The interview was originally published in IMPACT. 

When you are in a room with four top women leaders representing one network at various levels, you know that the organisation is definitely making steady progress on the ‘diversity meter’. Two of Dentsu’s global leaders, Amanda Morrissey, Global President, iProspect & Chief Growth Officer, Media; Shenda Loughnane, Global Brand President, dentsu X; and an APAC leader, Prerna Mehrotra, Chief Client Officer & CEO - Media, Asia Pacific, Dentsu, who were visiting Mumbai, along with Anita Kotwani, CEO - Media, South Asia, spoke to Neeta Nair of IMPACT Magazine on why diversity is not just another box to tick at Dentsu.

Kotwani says, “We’re staring at a 30-70 ratio of women to men at Dentsu India. We have women leaders, but not right at the top. Previously, in the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) in the country, I was the only woman, now there are four of us in it. So, it is certainly progressing in the right direction.”

Besides the diversity agenda, there is a continuous effort to find new opportunities for growth beyond the avenues that a media agency would typically tap. Having a Group CEO who was a consultant in his past life may have a thing or two to contribute to this approach. So much so that the leadership doesn’t associate with the term ‘media agency’ any more, preferring to call themselves the ‘growth partners’ for clients, instead. The goal has been to take media to the boardroom, coupled with effectiveness and business intelligence that Dentsu actively seeks to provide.

The Group has built some differentiated offerings in India on the media side. dentsu X is about bringing together media, technology, and creative data to build integrated customer experiences; Carat is all about designing for people, looking at the business proposition through the lens of the consumer. Talking about the third agency- iProspect, Morrissey says, “When I joined Dentsu three years ago, the media landscape was changing, and so we merged Vizeum and iProspect to create a ‘performance-first’ brand. For e.g., we have teams of hyper specialists, strategists, creatives, and storytellers in the digital sphere. And while they can do big, full-funnel brand-building campaigns, they will always work on it, focussing on digital first. Vizeum was a real digital innovation agency brand, and it came together seamlessly with iProspect.

While on the creative side, we saw some of Dentsu’s most loved brands make a comeback in India, namely Webchutney and Isobar, after a massive consolidation exercise a few years ago, where they folded all their creative agencies (Webchutney, Isobar, Taproot, McGarryBowen etc) to create a single brand, one wonders if agency brands on the media side like Vizeum may return too, to handle competitive businesses in the growing client roster.

Kotwani clarifies, “At the moment, we don’t plan to bring back any of our older brands.” Elaborating on that, Mehrotra says, “We moved from 160 companies to about five or six globally. The whole endeavour has always been about moving from a collection of brands to creating business and becoming a client-centric organisation. But the clients were demanding that we bring back some of the agency brands, particularly on the creative side. So, it was more of a client pull rather than a push from our side because of which we tweaked the direction.”

The past year has been all about rebuilding, following multiple transformations at an organisational level, bringing on board newer leaders, and working towards fresher efficiencies. After Maruti and Reckitt, very large accounts, ended their relationship with Dentsu on the media side, last year, the team has worked round the clock to win newer ones, clocking 80 in just this year. Even as there is an equal focus on maintaining existing relationships and expanding its scope globally and regionally at Dentsu. Mehrotra highlights, “There are so many areas for us to expand our relationship—from media to creative, to CX, to commerce, to retail, thereby deepening the connection with clients. We want to strike a balance between how we retain, grow, and also drive new clients. It has been a two-pronged plan always.”

Talking about a digital-first Dentsu pivoting to tap newer opportunities, Kotwani says, “We’ve done some very interesting work on equity building exercises, go-to-market strategies, portfolio management stories; set up newer practices, and are changing our talent pool to deliver. Our initial pilot has been successful, and now we want to scale it up. We’re not worried about the competitive pricing because what the client wants is a business outcome, and we have shown them how we could get them that.”

While Dentsu India’s Creative Practice has proven its creative edge a few years ago, by bringing home the ‘Agency of the Year’ title at Cannes Lions, Dentsu’s Media Practice is awaiting its moment in the sun, but the idea clearly is to integrate the two and present a singular entity for the clients’ benefit. “We love working on integrated briefs. Even if it’s a media brief from our client, we ensure that we have our creative folks and their ideas inbuilt in it. Amit (Wadhwa) and Gurbaksh (Singh) always come up with ideas integrated so beautifully in our story that the client feels he is not just working with a media agency but an integrated one, and that is the beauty of the Dentsu structure,” adds Kotwani.

Lastly, in the larger scheme of things, India clearly seems to have a place of significance on the global map for Dentsu, as evident by a recent announcement about 2 out of 5 Dentsu Labs —the network’s innovation proposition--being in India. The aim is clearly to set the agenda here, and to take it to the world, says the leadership.

Dentsu, Diversity and more
The four Dentsu leaders, Amanda Morrissey, Global President, iProspect & Chief Growth Officer, Media; Shenda Loughnane, Global Brand President, dentsu X; Prerna Mehrotra, Chief Client Officer & CEO - Media, Asia Pacific, Dentsu, and Anita Kotwani, CEO - Media, South Asia, talk to Neeta Nair about how they are hiring differently to build a new Dentsu and changing course to make themselves more relevant for the client’s business

Q] What plays on your mind when you hire? Does diversity become a focus at Dentsu, or is it clear that you simply hire the best person for the job regardless of gender, background, or orientation?
Amanda: Dentsu’s really unique because diversity is properly at the core of the DNA, not an afterthought or a figure that we have to report. When we think about roles, the job’s advertised in the most equal way possible. It’s not just gender equality; it’s broader than that, and the focus is on people from different backgrounds too. We make sure we’ve got the right mix within the team and the best person for the job. Having a diverse team leads to better work, and we firmly believe that.

Q] In India, there are very few women leaders at the top in advertising. Do you attempt to set that right subconsciously while hiring your top-level leaders?
Anita: When I was hiring CEOs for our two agencies, the position was open to everyone. We hired one woman, Sanchayeeta Verma for Carat, and one man, Jose Leon for dentsu X, keeping in mind the other technical capabilities that the role demanded, because we wanted to move the agency from a traditional mindset into a digital data and tech-driven one. Our aim was to have a mix where one CEO drives business in a big way, one drives the product story, and the other drives the data and tech story. That way, we can learn and complement each other, and with collective intelligence, we are able to land what India needs in this marketplace.

Q] You said you brought in Jose Leon for his technical know-how; is the divide still strong, where unfortunately agencies lean more towards men for technical expertise?

Anita: Not at all. It’s gender neutral and definitely focused on specialization. One of the reasons why I moved from my previous organisation to this one was because I saw woman leaders at the helm here and realised that the importance given to them at Dentsu was higher than any other operating company.

Prerna: Recruiting is one part of it; a lot of time is spent on training and developing people. While all our hires are skill-based, I have spoken to a lot of women who have a bit of hesitation and self-doubt when it comes to their capabilities; they need a nudge. Thus, mentoring becomes important. I’d like to add that I’ve been with the organisation for eight years, and I believe all the men at Dentsu are phenomenal. I’ve had the best male bosses who have given me the opportunity to grow. Also, for me, diversity is not just about gender; it is also in different races because that, for me, is where innovation happens.

Shenda: We have some very senior female role models in some really technical areas of our business on the global level too, like Shirli Zelcer, who is the chief data and technology officer at Dentsu. I also loved Prerna’s point about the nudge. I have a personal example to prove that, because Amanda used to be my boss, and when this job became available, my first reaction was, I don’t know if I will clear the process. That’s more of a female reaction than male. And it was Amanda who told me that I must apply. I really did need that push.

Q] What is the value that a media agency brings to a client’s business today?

Prerna: Media agencies of today should be about ‘business partnering’. Clients want to bring on board partners that can work with them from the inception of an idea to delivery, and that’s why they come to us. They don’t care about what happens within our world; they’re bothered about their brands, their businesses, and their growth. It’s about value creation, and therefore, the business partnership becomes really important. What excites me about the new world is that there are no boundaries. It is gratifying to see the shape that India is going to take for us as a country, and having these lovely ladies here in town is a testament to that. We believe that Asia is going to now set the example or become the test case for what we drive globally.

Q] Lines are blurring at agencies; how long till the divisions between media, creative, digital, PR, etc. last? What new opportunities are you seeing as far as growing revenue is concerned?

Shenda: I’d like to say that media and creative are back together again. In the algorithmic world that we’re in now, where AI is the gatekeeper, it’s all about understanding that relationship between the two. Creative impacts almost 50 percent of performance marketing. And thus, bringing those two things together at speed and in scale is really important. We made a big investment a number of years ago in a company called Tag, which is also present here in India. It is allowing us to deliver the content and the assets at speed and at scale for our clients. So, the two coming together and being able to produce those assets at that volume and scale is really quite critical.

Q] As per COMvergence 2023 New Business Barometer for India, none of the Dentsu media agencies came even in the top 5, ditto for Dentsu Media globally, how long before rebuilding starts bearing fruit?

Amanda: It’s a really interesting question. So, iProspect is surging, and we’ve had a ridiculous amount of growth over the last three years, winning almost every global business that we went to pitch for. For the last three years, we’ve geared up specifically around iProspect because it’s a new proposition. We wanted to push it out into the market. Because we behave as sister brands, we’re not competitive against each other. Lots of the other big networks have copied us with similar integrations, so we have to keep our foot on the gas to stay ahead. When you start to think about how creative and media are coming together in the media landscape, I feel there is a big playground for dentsu X to play. Carat, on the other hand, is the mother of the media agencies and has all of our big global network clients sitting within it. So, a real focus for Carat is to stabilise the existing big global clients. Meanwhile, we get flexibility in iProspect and DX. And what’s really exciting about India is that we’ve also got Sokrati to play in that portfolio, unlike other countries. So, we are here because we really want to push forward certain propositions, and India can be our test case. We will build it here, test it, and then globally dive in with the team rolling it out across the rest of the world.

Q] What kind of growth has the media practice seen in India in the past year?

Anita: We’ve added about 80 odd logos this year, which is across performance and integrated practices that we have had. We’re obviously trying to see if we’re able to overcome the loss of the two big businesses last year. The growth number will definitely be a higher single-digit one. Our tools and technology are a great differentiator in the marketplace in India.

Q] So, just to simplify this, would you say that it’s easier for Dentsu India or for Dentsu Global to get into the top three of the new business wins list, faster?

Amanda: It’s really hard on a global stage. I’ll leave it to Anita to talk about India, but when you look at the individual markets, it’s actually easier to move faster because you’re more in control of your destiny within that market, whereas at a global level we’re playing a game across markets, which is often harder.

Anita: The RECMA ratings ranked us at #4 in 2023 among the overall operating groups (based on our overall activities). In India, Carat and iProspect have shown remarkable growth in 2023, with iProspect achieving a staggering 80% growth and claiming the top spot, while Carat followed with a strong 40% growth, securing the #2 position. Over the past three years, iProspect has led the charge with an exceptional growth rate of 388%, while Carat has closely trailed with an impressive 305% growth, outpacing much of the competition. One brand needs to reshape, try, and build a lot more businesses. But there’s a lot of momentum there as well. So, we’ve had a series of pitches this year, which we’re pretty confident about. Some we’ve won, and on some we are still awaiting the results. We will, however, be more focused on whether we have been able to deliver the business results for our existing clients.

Q] Considering your focus as ‘growth partners’ as opposed to traditional media agencies, do you feel in the near future, the revenue avenues for you will be starkly different from what made money for a digital-first Dentsu in all these years?

Anita: Yes, media is going to get commoditised with the use of automation, AI in the business-as-usual part of it. If you don’t pivot to new services and new offerings, you’re not going to be able to change. Harsha said he would like consulting to rake in 50% of our revenues in some years. But let’s be very honest, we are not the McKinseys and the Accentures that everybody is waiting to give us a consulting project. But, hand on heart, we won two or three from the big ones at a pricing, that is lucrative for us. So, we are fairly confident about how we are building the practice. It’s all about the talent game in India; we’ll invest and bring in some great talent.

Amanda: Our whole proposition as a group is innovating to impact, which is going to change shape as the media landscape gets more addressable, accountable, shoppable, and algorithmically driven. We have got to deliver what we need today while continually building the next thing in the future. Globally, Dentsu was always the leader in Digital, and we will continue to do that along with leading in the ‘performance’ world, and for that, we are actively thinking about how to work with big publishers, platform partners, and clients to create the future. Our Dentsu Ventures team invests with our clients on startups, new technologies, and systems that we might need to work on in the future. We also need to build a more data, SAAS and technology-driven future for our clients and need to be agile enough to be able to pivot around that.