Don't miss ADWEEK House at Cannes, June 16-19. Join us as we celebrate our 45th anniversary and explore the industry's now and next. RSVP.
When Fred Levron joined Dentsu as the global chief creative officer in November last year, he had a mammoth task ahead of him.
Reinvent the creative network.
Dentsu International has been on a path of consolidation, taking over 160 agency brands and reducing them to just a handful. Levron and CEO Wendy Clark are using this opportunity to revamp its creative offerings to think about what Dentsu could look like if they started from scratch.
“If you had to create a global creative network in 2022…made for the modern age, the current media landscape, client needs and made for today and tomorrow, what it would look like?” Levron posited in a conversation with Adweek.
The result is Dentsu Creative, the amalgamation of global agency brands DentsuMB, Isobar and U.S.-based 360i. Starting today, those agency brands will cease to exist as their work and employees will now be part of Dentsu Creative. Levron envisioned an agency that combines DentsuMB’s traditional brand building abilities, 360i’s digital expertise and Isobar’s innovation and data capabilities. It’s all part of Dentsu’s plan to bulk up its creative offerings to meet the needs of clients, who increasingly want to consolidate all marketing services within a single holding company.
The reorganization is built around Levron’s view of modern creativity and having it flow through Dentsu horizontally into its other two lines of business—media and CXM. Dentsu will also reveal a creative council made up of both internal leaders and external hires, and will feature members from all three lines of business, including Merkle’s Amy Thorne, Carat’s Fiona Lloyd and Dentsu Taiwan’s Alice Chou. Dentsu Creative will have 17 key markets across the globe, including New York, Shanghai and London.
“Outside of Japan, Dentsu International is seven years old,” Levron said. “We’re taking the chance to actually design the company having in mind the times.”
Why now
Clark was blunt about her assessment of Dentsu’s creative line before Levron joined from FCB.
“Our creative proposition was not where it needed to be, and nor in my opinion, was in keeping with what the market was looking for,” Clark told Adweek.
In 2021, Dentsu ranked behind its Big 5 holding company counterparts, as well as Stagwell, Havas and Accenture Interactive in COMvergence’s new U.S. business rankings.
Clark’s desire is to make Dentsu the most integrated network among the holding companies. Creating a single creative entity allows Dentsu to meet clients’ needs as they’re looking for streamlined operations, but also to work with agency partners that have comprehensive capabilities. Of Dentsu’s 100 largest clients, 83 are already purchasing services from at least two of Dentsu’s three lines of business. By flooding creativity horizontally through the network, Clark said the goal is to get that to 100%.
“46,000 people come to work every day to create things in the world that will help drive outcomes, create culture, change society and invent the future,” Clark said. “We’ve got to live into that. There was every reason to act and leapfrog into where we saw this going.”
Clark told Adweek the company could no longer have smaller, fragmented brands with “individual pockets of capabilities,” but need a single agency brand that could emblematic of the true scale of the company. No creative agencies will live outside of the Dentsu Creative brand in a way that Droga5 lives outside of Accenture Song because “none of our brands really had the global stature that is required.”
Levron’s modern creativity
At the core of the reorganization is building an agency fueled by what Levron calls modern creativity, which is defined by three core values—create culture, change society and invent the future.
Levron doesn’t want brands to just be a part of culture, but to create it. He points to an example with Heineken, which spends a significant amount of money sponsoring events around the world, which he acknowledged in past environments was the right play for the brand. Instead he wants to help Heineken invent an audience, explaining the brand could be an entertainment player that happens to sell great beer.
“Stop interrupting what people want to do to push your brand message. Create IPs that are so compelling that people will look for that,” Levron said, adding, “Ultimately don’t invite yourself to a party you might not be invited to.”
Changing society is where Levron views brand purpose to come into play and Clark ties in the company’s sustainability goals. Levron argues that introducing a product in 2022 means brands having a point of view and running their business are now one thing. He calls that “beautiful news for creatives because our ideas will impact you, your community, society and sometimes the world at large.”
Levron’s value of inventing the future ties in the ability to take creative ideas and align them with technological or data capabilities to amplify them.
Dentsu Creative will grade its work across all three lines of business on a creative scale Levron developed, and it will be implemented in Dentsu Japan as well in order for the company to be better aligned on what makes work great. Levron’s philosophy is to be “tough on the work, gentle on the people.”
“The future is seamless, integrated capabilities put together in ways that will help create culture, change society and invent the future,” Clark said, adding, “That’s we can’t have any friction between that and at the root of it has to be creativity.”
A new structure
By combining 360i, DentsuMB and Isobar in the U.S., as well as numerous agencies around the world, Dentsu Creative must fold all of its leadership into one structure. Because this consolidation has been in the works for some time, Dentsu has generally been able to avoid redundant leadership positions at the regional level.
For instance, the U.S. executive committee will blend leaders together from the three agencies, with executives now being grouped around regions and capabilities like entertainment, earned attention and experience. Jon Dupuis drops global president, DentsuMB from his title, but remains CEO, Dentsu, Creative Americas, while Abbey Klaassen removes president of 360i, and Laurel Stack Flatt, ditches president of DentsuMB Chicago, to lead the East and West regions, respectively. Dentsu Creative will in the coming months announce additional hires and leaders, including who will oversee the individual capabilities.
As part of this restructuring, Clark said there would be no layoffs as she and Levron have a multimillion-dollar investment fund to hire around the world and support the 17 key markets.
“We’re investing in creativity and if creativity is our raison d’être, then you have to treat this as you would an M&A acquisition,” Clark said.
In total, Dentsu will have about 9,000 creatives across 145 total markets worldwide.
