Within the media realm, we’ve had our three power brands—Carat, Dentsu X and iProspect—continue to evolve and position themselves based on market opportunity.
On the Merkle side, we built a media practice. The intention was to use media as a vehicle for a connected customer experience, so not removing media from the customer experience journey but ensuring it’s included. Targeting tools like M1, which is now Merkury for media, accelerate and enable that identity-based customer journey through the media ecosystem.
Media sat within Merkle for so long because it was so tightly connected to those other customer experience offerings. What we wanted to do at Dentsu was enable the purchase of Merkle to power the rest of the network.
This move brings the Merkle approach to media, combines it with the historical performance routes that iProspect is so well known for, and accelerates that connection between Merkle and what we can offer from a media perspective.
Is differentiating Dentsu Media’s agency brands something you’re concerned about?
Rutgersson: We’ll be using the iProspect branding and iProspect name. We’ll end up being the largest in size, in terms of team and revenue, within Dentsu. [Merkle and iProspect are] like-for-like, in terms of people and revenue. Bringing those together gives us this large performance powerhouse, with the ability to serve clients at every stage of the funnel.
What we have in Carat are really brand-focused, creative heavy, larger advertisers. Dentsu X is a boutique agency, future-forward, fast [and] agile.
For iProspect, the differentiation is twofold. It’s really leveraging the performance powerhouse roots that, frankly, we share [with sister agencies] but iProspect has been known for, and bringing the CX centricity that Merkle Media has built over the years into that fold. We think there’s a unique client set that is wanting to be mature in its performance perspective, use the performance mindset at every media touchpoint and bring CX centricity.
There are lot of moving parts as a result of Dentsu’s recent reorgs. What does the integrated organization look like right now?
Rutgersson: We moved about 500 people over, and they will be integrated by the end of this year. They’re all identity-based media practitioners. We acquired Media Storm three years ago, which rounded out our buying capabilities [at Merkle]. We didn’t historically have a lot of traditional media chops.
We also integrated the Merkle B2B practice, which was the former acquisition of [digital marketing agency] DWA. What that prompted was a verticalization of our teams and our expertise. The evolved iProspect will be formed of seven client pods, which are organized by vertical to ensure that what we’re doing from a media perspective is aligning to [clients’] holistic business.
For example, we’ll have retail, financial services, health and nonprofit, luxury and a global group. The new structure will have seven managing directors, a combination of leaders from the iProspect side and the Merkle Media side. They’ll be categorizing their clients in order to service the businesses that we work with more broadly.
The other big move is Amanda’s role. Amanda stepped in as our chief growth officer to bring customer centricity into media. Amanda will be responsible for new business growth––new market growth, as well as existing organic client growth.