Laurence vs Flywheel

Some brands ask us how we compare with Flywheel. Others ask about Omnicom. It’s mostly the same question, because Flywheel is Omnicom’s commerce business. Omnicom agreed to buy Flywheel from Ascential in October 2023 and closed the deal in January 2024. Flywheel now calls itself “the designated commerce practice area of Omnicom”, and on Omnicom’s own site, “Omnicom Commerce runs on Flywheel”, with one chief executive leading both. So this page covers both names.

The short version: Flywheel is a full commerce partner for big brands. Its teams and software run retail media on more than a hundred retailers, plus content, operations, market intelligence and in-store work. Laurence does one part of that job, Amazon ads, and starts by asking what each click is worth to you, from your margin and how likely that click is to convert at each placement, and bids that. Your target is still there, but as a guardrail rather than the starting point.

Flywheel, in a few paragraphs

Flywheel has been in digital commerce since 2014. It was the digital commerce business of Ascential until Omnicom bought it, and Omnicom said at the time that Flywheel would run as a practice area within Omnicom. In January 2026, Omnicom moved its retail agency TPN into Flywheel, adding shopper marketing, retail design and in-store work. Flywheel says it has more than 2,000 employees in over 20 countries, and its home page counts 4,500 clients, including more than 50 of the top 100 publicly listed global CPG brands. That’s a serious footprint, and we respect it.

Flywheel sells both services and software. In its managed media service, Flywheel’s team runs paid search on retailer marketplaces, programmatic display and video on Amazon DSP, Walmart DSP, Roundel and The Trade Desk, and Amazon Marketing Cloud work, with local language experts running campaigns in each region. Its Commerce Cloud is self-serve software for retail media, retail operations and market intelligence. For bidding, it lists goal-based bidding “powered by Perpetua”, intraday and rule-based bidding, and placement targeting.

What stands out most is how much of the commerce job it covers. Beyond ads, Flywheel offers content and catalog work, fee recovery and retail analytics, brand protection, supply chain and cross-border selling, creative and consulting, and since TPN joined, Connected Commerce for shopper and in-store marketing. It is an Amazon Ads Advanced Partner, and in June 2026 it added GEO, a service that works on getting products recommended by the AI shopping assistants on Amazon, Walmart and Target. If you’re a large brand that wants one partner for all of commerce, not just ads, that’s hard to match.

Laurence, in a few paragraphs

We’re building autonomous advertising across the entire internet, starting with Amazon Ads for e-commerce brands. We’re a full-stack AI company: we aren’t a tool your team has to operate, and we aren’t an agency selling hours. Our models do the work on every account, and our deployments team sets your strategy with you, reviews what the models did, and is the people you talk to.

The belief underneath everything we do is that advertising is a math problem. A click has an expected profit you can actually calculate: how likely it is to convert, what the order is worth, what you keep after costs, and what you paid for it. Once you can price a single click, the right bid, placement modifier and budget follow. Our methodology goes into more detail.

Where we agree

Before the differences, it’s worth saying what we have in common.

We both think a bid should move within the day, not once a week: Flywheel lists intraday bidding, and we re-price every search term’s bid every hour. And we both think people should stay involved: to set the strategy, to catch what software misses, and to be someone you can call.

If you’re coming from a team that adjusts bids by hand once a week, either of us will feel like a big step up. The rest of this page is about how to choose between the two.

What each bid is aiming at

This is the biggest difference in how the ads themselves are run, so it gets the most space.

Flywheel’s software lists goal-based bidding powered by Perpetua, the Amazon ads software, and Perpetua’s goals bid toward a target ACOS that you set (we compare it with Laurence on its own page). Flywheel’s pages don’t say which targets its own teams bid toward. Either way, a target is how most of the industry works, and there’s a good reason for it. A target is simple to agree on and simple to check: pick a number, and the system holds the account to it.

We start one step earlier, with what the click is worth to you. The math fits on one line:

Order value is what the shopper spends on that order. A customer who comes back is worth more than one order, and we already measure how often that happens for each product; bringing it into the bid is what we’re building next. Margin is what you keep after the cost of the product, Amazon’s fees and returns. Bid below that value and the click makes you money; bid above it and it doesn’t. A target ACOS is a shortcut to the same answer, and it only lands in the right place when the target happens to match what the product can afford. Here’s what that looks like with three products and one target:

One more thing we care about: we treat your target as a limit, not the goal, and try to win every click that clears it, so your volume grows as far as your economics allow.

To be fair, you can set a different target for every product, and good teams do. The hard part is picking each one well and keeping it right as prices, margins and CVR change. That’s the part we take off your plate. We recalculate the value from your numbers for every search term every hour and every placement every night, and your ROAS, CAC or TACOS goal stays on top as a limit the bids have to respect.

Search terms with only a few clicks

Something that surprised us when we started: most of what an Amazon account pays for barely has any data. On the median account we run, 95% of the search terms that get a click get fewer than ten clicks a month. With that little to go on, a term’s average CVR is mostly noise. Four clicks and no orders reads as 0%, but it really just means you don’t know yet.

Flywheel’s pages don’t say how its bidding handles terms with this little data, so we won’t guess. Our approach is to treat each term’s CVR as a range instead of one number. A term with little history gets bid with that uncertainty priced in, and it borrows evidence from similar searches, so it starts from a sensible guess rather than from zero. As clicks come in, the range tightens and the bid settles toward what the term has actually shown.

Placements and organic rank

Amazon lets you bid once per search term and then raise that bid for certain placements. That matters more than it sounds: on the median account we run, clicks at the top of search convert at about twice the rate of clicks further down. So we work out the CVR for each placement and bid each one at what its clicks are worth. In practice that means setting the base bid for the placement that converts worst, then raising the others with modifiers, so product page clicks aren’t bought at a top-of-search price. Flywheel lists placement targeting among its bidding tools too.

Organic rank matters to both of us. Ad sales help a product climb the organic results, and organic sales don’t cost anything per click. We track your organic rank on the terms we bid on every day and judge each product on TACOS, so the organic sales your ads help earn are counted. Pricing what each rank is worth into the bid itself is what we’re building next. Flywheel treats organic growth as its own line of work: its Amazon service includes search optimization, content enrichment and share of voice measurement, its software suggests better titles, descriptions and bullets, and its GEO service works on how AI shopping assistants read your listings.

Who does the work, and what you get to see

With Flywheel, you choose between its people and its software. In the managed service, Flywheel’s media, retail and content teams do the work alongside yours. With Commerce Cloud, your own team runs the self-serve software, including its rule-based bidding. Its software also measures what your ads cause by comparing sales when they show against when they don’t, and puts media next to availability and conversion in its retail analytics. That choice suits large companies with commerce teams of their own.

With us there are no rules to write. You tell us the goal, whether that’s profit, growth, or a CAC, TACOS or ROAS number, and the limits you want, and the models make the calls a person would otherwise make by hand: which searches to go after, what to bid on each one every hour, how to price each placement, and how to set budgets. Our team checks what the models did and is there whenever you want to talk it through.

We also care a lot about you being able to see why. In the Laurence platform every search term shows its spend, sales, ROAS and clicks, and every bid has a history with a plain-English reason for each change. Ask Laurence answers questions about your business from the same data the models use. If something looks off, you shouldn’t have to wait for a call to find out why.

Channels and services

Flywheel simply covers more today, and not only in ads. Its retail media software works across more than 100 retailers and marketplaces, including Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Target, Kroger, DoorDash, Mercado Libre and TikTok Shop. Its managed team runs display and video on Amazon DSP, Walmart DSP, Roundel and The Trade Desk, and it works on marketplaces from Lazada and Shopee to Tmall and JD.com. Around the ads sit content, catalog, fee recovery, supply chain, market intelligence, creative, consulting and in-store work.

We run Amazon Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP on our own seat. Meta and Google are in early beta, and we’re holding them to the same standard as Amazon before we call them ready. We’d rather go deep before we go wide. But if Walmart, Target or marketplaces outside the US are a big part of your business today, or you want one partner for the whole commerce job, that’s a real reason to look at Flywheel.

Pricing and getting started

Neither of us publishes a price list, and Flywheel’s pages don’t say how it charges. We start by asking you to connect your Amazon Ads and Seller Central or Vendor Central accounts with read access, and then build you a pilot proposal from your own data: where your ad money goes today, the targets we’d set for each product line, and the bids our models would place. Pricing is agreed with the pilot.

Which one is right for you

Switching from Flywheel to Laurence

You don’t have to switch everything at once, and honestly, we’d suggest you don’t. We can run one marketplace or one product family while Flywheel keeps the rest. That way you get a clean comparison on your own account instead of taking our word for it.

It also helps to be honest about what you’re replacing. Flywheel’s team may run more for you than Amazon ads, such as content, other retailers or in-store work, so moving the ads changes who you talk to about them, not just which software sets the bids. Starting with one product line makes that change smaller.

1. 01
   Connect with read access.We read your Amazon Ads and Seller Central or Vendor Central data to build your pilot proposal. Nothing in your account changes at this point.
2. 02
   Agree on the pilot.You pick the products and the goals. Check the notice period in your Flywheel agreement so the handover lines up, and agree up front what Flywheel keeps running, such as DSP, so both sides’ results stay clean.
3. 03
   We build our own campaigns.Our campaigns carry a Laurence prefix, and we pause the existing ones on the products we take over, so the results stay easy to tell apart. Your history stays in your account.
4. 04
   If you stop.If you stop, we pause and archive our campaigns and leave yours as they were, so you can turn them back on.

Common questions

Is Flywheel part of Omnicom?

Yes. Omnicom bought Flywheel from Ascential in a deal that closed in January 2024, and Flywheel calls itself the designated commerce practice area of Omnicom. Omnicom’s site describes its commerce business, Omnicom Commerce, as running on Flywheel, with TracyLocke alongside it.

Is Laurence an alternative to Flywheel?

For Amazon ads, yes. Both can run your Amazon advertising, with bids that move within the day and people overseeing the work. Laurence bids from what each click is worth to your business rather than from one target, and focuses on Amazon. Flywheel covers more retailers and the wider commerce job, from content to in-store.

Does Laurence run Walmart or Instacart ads?

Not today. Laurence runs Amazon Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP, with Meta and Google ads in early beta. Flywheel works across Walmart, Instacart, Target and many other retailers today.

Does Laurence need my cost of goods?

It helps, but you can start without it. Laurence works from your Amazon Ads history and sales data. A margin or cost of goods for each product makes each click’s value more accurate.

Can I run Laurence and Flywheel at the same time?

Yes, on separate products or marketplaces. Laurence bids only on the campaigns it creates, and pauses your existing ones only on the products it takes over, so each side’s results stay easy to read. Flywheel can keep your other retailers and the work outside ads.

How we wrote this. We described Flywheel’s services, software, channels and size from flywheeldigital.com, Omnicom’s commerce page and the two companies’ press releases as of November 11, 2026, and things may have changed since. Flywheel’s size figures are its own. Laurence figures are medians across the 15 store profiles we run, covering all of their Sponsored Products spend, October 6 to November 4, 2026. The click value chart uses made-up numbers to show the idea. If we’ve got anything about Flywheel or Omnicom wrong or out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it.