iProspect’s New Execs Explain the Blueprint and Early Impacts of Its Comprehensive Restructuring

For two years and counting, Dentsu has made incisive organizational changes that include replacing an entire cohort of senior leaders and molding a new corporate structure.

The reorganization is ongoing, with Dentsu Creative replacing its U.S. CEO Paulo Fogaca with its former New York president, Abbey Klaassen, on Nov. 8. Since the Dentsu Media’s iProspect experienced leadership changes this year, new executives are leaning into the agency’s performance-savvy reputation to underscore its integration with Merkle Media.

In August, Dentsu proper folded its performance creative practice into Dentsu Creative, and its media analytics practice into Merkle. It also announced that iProspect would absorb the smaller media practice inside its sister company, Merkle. The shifting structure impacted more than 1,000 Dentsu employees.

Winding down the Merkle brand returned media services to the group’s three media agencies: iProspect, Carat and Dentsu X. After the agency absorbed Merkle Media, the group promoted Liz Rutgersson from her role as Merkle’s chief media officer to iProspect’s North America CEO.

Bringing in former Merkle leaders signals that among the group’s technically full-service subsidiaries, iProspect will have the tightest grasp on audience targeting.

And with iProspect, Dentsu Media is testing out what happens when a performance-oriented media agency commingles with an audience management asset. For one, iProspect gained new clients, including Albertson’s, Ashley Furniture, Citizens Bank and Workday. Of the holding companies that own Merkle competitors, Dentsu is the first to structurally commit to this level of integration.

Rutgersson and iProspect Americas chief growth officer Amanda Moore, who formerly led Americas growth at Merkle, sat down with Adweek to talk about what’s changed at iProspect and Merkle, and their next steps.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Walk me through why integrating with iProspect was the right decision.

Rutgersson: Dentsu has been centralizing around three big offerings: creative, media and customer experience.

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.

How much does that mirror the structure that existed within Merkle Media prior to its integration with iProspect, and how much is brand new?

Rutgersson: It’s very similar to the structure that we had in Merkle Media and in iProspect. We’ve intentionally aligned over the past couple of years with this integration in mind. Having client portfolios focused on business needs is not new to either organization, but turning the dial up on that vertical focus is what we’re bringing to the evolved iProspect.

Amanda, where will new biz leads come through––the individual agencies, Merkle, or is there a Dentsu Media team handling inbound requests?

Moore: Dentsu traditionally has relied upon a more inbound perspective, but Merkle Media has had a very strong growth platform for over 15 or 20 years. We’re bringing the prowess of that proactive effort into iProspect. It will be about 50% inbound and 50% proactive leads from the team that I’m bringing over from Merkle.

We’re looking for digitally mature clients who have exceeded the foundations of performance and are leading with customer centricity. [We want clients to say,] ‘This is where I spend my most dollars, I want to test and learn, I want to test identity, and I want to see how the intake of that first party data can then evolve the rest of our business.’ The most traction that we’ve seen in the last 18 to 24 months under Liz’s leadership inside of Merkle Media has been this idea of selling the ‘next thing.’

[We’re telling clients they] can get compounded ROI. We’re going to create this 20% to 25% lift in efficiency through identity-based media that also can influence their CRM and loyalty programs in a way that provides better business outcomes.

It sounds like you are leaning into Merkle’s offering so that iProspect can be more consultative and full funnel. Would you say that’s a correct characterization?

Moore: I would, yes. Pre-pandemic, we saw a lot of agency consolidation where brand agencies were taking over performance. Because of the pandemic and the economic turbulence in the market, people are trying to do more with less. With a performance mindset at every touchpoint, we’ve seen tremendous success with our message in the marketplace. I think we onboarded 10-plus new logos across retail, grocery and financial services in the last year that are more than just media clients to us.

Is your target audience still the CMO, or is it broader now?

Moore: The CTO center of power is gaining more traction as ad tech matures. We are trying to bridge the gap between the CMO and the CTO. A lot of the work I did over the last year in my role as Merkle’s growth officer was identifying where those cross points are, and [involved] being a facilitator between the CMO and the CTO.

I am also curious if Merkury for media be available to any iProspect client, or if it’s something additional they’ll need to purchase.

Rutgersson: It’s available to all clients across the Dentsu network. We use it for planning, strategy and audience identification already. There’s been a big investment in that technology that we’ll be rolling out over the next few months and sharing more detail on in the New Year. All Dentsu clients will benefit from the evolution of our Merkury toolset.

We do have a couple of ways to activate media, but we really think about this as a technology fee… as an addition to your tech stack. So, we’ve evolved the way that clients can engage with us when it comes to Merkury for media.