Omnicom wins L’Oréal media in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Wavemaker loses the account
Omnicom Media Group takes over media planning and buying for L'Oréal in Germany, Austria and Switzerland from January 2027. The budget is put at about 350 million euros.
Photo: Mikael Blomkvist / Pexels (Pexels License)
Wavemaker will stop buying media for L’Oréal in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The cosmetics group has chosen Omnicom Media Group instead, and the new contract starts in January 2027. German trade titles Meedia and Horizont put the budget at about 350 million euros.
Omnicom Media Group starts on the account in January 2027
The deal covers media planning and buying. Meedia lists Lancôme, Garnier, Maybelline, La Roche-Posay, Mixa and Vichy among the brands involved. Those sit at very different price points, from supermarket shelves to beauty counters. One agency group will now buy for all of them in the three markets.
Wavemaker held L’Oréal for about five years
Wavemaker belongs to WPP. It had the business for roughly five years. Before that the work sat with iBeauty, a team Publicis built for this client. The account has therefore passed through all three of the largest agency groups in under a decade. PepsiCo moved its global media to Publicis after 25 years with Omnicom.
L’Oréal opened the review in spring 2026
The review began in spring 2026 and ran for about six months. Horizont reads the move as a search for fresh thinking in media. L’Oréal itself has said nothing about the reasons. The win lands while Omnicom Media reports new billings of 3.3 billion dollars for the first half of 2026.
Omnicom gains one of the larger European media budgets and WPP loses it. Publishers and platforms in the three markets will be talking about L’Oréal money with different people from January. Wavemaker keeps the work until then. Dentsu took Netflix’s EMEA media in a similar block move this year.