Dentsu Creative Wants to “Arrive a Little Bit to the Australian Market” in 2025

Dentsu Creative’s leadership team thinks the agency had a better 2024 than the market may believe. Its execs pitched 14 times, got on shortlists they didn’t expect to, and expanded the agency’s remit on a number of key clients. 

“We got invited to all of the big pitches that we could possibly be on without conflict, and we did really well in a lot of those, like coming second out of nowhere,” CEO Kirsty Muddle said to LBB in an interview at the end of 2024. “That’s a leading indicator that we’ve got our product right.”

Each time, the team got closer to articulating and refining the Dentsu Creative pitch, even if they didn’t win. 

“Look, was it the result we were looking for? No. Have we learned a lot about ourselves? Absolutely,” said Cate Stuart-Robertson, Dentsu Creative’s chief client officer who joined two years ago.

“Have we got clarity for next year and how we move forward? 150%. But what has been the most rewarding has been the organic growth from our clients.”

In 2024, Dentsu Creative retained and added Tag to the L’Oreal remit, won Adobe, expanded its relationship with Amex by winning its social work, and survived “big change” at NBN. As Cate explains, the business “got a new CEO, new CMO, the whole marketing team changed.” 

Chief growth and strategy officer David Halter, who joined in 2022 from CHEP, called it “growing through stealth”. Kirsty added, “Our economic position on this is that when the market is receding and retracting, we're in growth.”

“Arms of Dentsu Creative … are branching into Dentsu Network clients that the market probably has no idea that we're doing,” David continued.

“The Adobe win will slingshot our capability in terms of AI production and data and personalisation, because you've got a client there that has to be customer zero to prove that their tech works, whereas you might have a supermarket or a bank who's trying to drag the agency with them, we have to be ahead of where Adobe needs to be.”

Organic growth was necessary to fill the void left by Toyota, which handed its entire creative account to Publicis’ Saatchi & Saatchi.

“We're sitting, combined with our Tag [the digital production arm Dentsu acquired in 2023] capability, in growth,” Kirsty said of the Melbourne office. 

“We're a decent sized business. We're above mid-tier in our size, and we've maintained and strengthened that position this year [2024]. I'm so proud of this team. A lot of people would have given up. We'd had it [Toyota] for 22 years, going, 'They're never going to be able to fill that massive hole', but we filled it because our current clients trust us that we're giving them what they need to grow. And so as a result of that, we're growing.”

David noted that the shape of that organic growth is different to the Toyota work. “The Adobe client expects AI driven concepts ... they want to see 25 versions of a creative idea, whereas Toyota, that wasn't their wheelhouse. So completely different capability. Same with Amex content, it's more editorial, it's more social, it's influencer based.”

As the type of work has changed shape, Kirsty added, “we've had to change the shape of our capability, and that has meant that we've had to change some of the people in the business too, which is fair, but it's not because we're going backwards. It's because the demand from our clients and the kind of work we're doing is changing.” 

In April 2024, the business restructured to simplify its product: Kirsty would lead product and practice, and Fiona Johnston client counsel and commercial. As a result, media boss Danny Bass left the business, as did Merkle’s CEO.

Kirsty said the relatively new structure is “quite a different way of going to market, but what it helps us do is put the right people on the right problem at the right time. 

“It can feel like you have to run through a brick wall to get access to people when you've got completely different P&Ls.”

Tag’s AI-led capability, and a strong PR business, are key parts of its offering as the business looks to tackle 2025. Tag allows Dentsu to say to clients, “'We can make you 2,000 assets for $90,000 that are all TV quality,” Kirsty explained. “Clients don't stand up and ask for that, but when they find that out as part of a bigger [conversation, they say], 'Oh, wow.'”

The PR unit has a headcount of 40, and revenue and billings in the “double digit millions” - “they’re exceeding every task we set them,” Kirsty said. A PR capability at that size (which includes Cox Inall Ridgeway, 49% Dentsu-owned and 51% owned by the First Nations employee trust) allows the business to be close to “the heartbeat of culture” and hoover up budget.

“As the market is shrinking, from a core creative point of view, just in this country, we're capturing some of the fragmentation of that money into PR,” she continued.

“And so we've captured some of that, which is why that's growing. Not only is it good and aiding our core product, but it's also capturing the fragmentation of the market right now.”

Clients are saying they want to do more for less, but in reality, “the money’s moved somewhere else,” Cate added. “Clients have had a harder year than we have this year. Honestly, I think so many clients are going through tough conversations, and I think you just have to best support them through that.”

The business is treating every client contract like a “one year relationship” so as not to take its partnerships for granted, Cate said, “so you're always auditioning.” It means making, versus taking, the brief, according to David, and having more of a direct influence on how a marketer spends their next six months.

“Half of our job is to help our clients get to their next job,” Cate said. “Being able to go over the point of view of what we think could be actually really rewarding for the next six months has also been a really great way for us to organically grow, because it lets our clients see us in a different light.”

Growth is hard to find, and stagnation means clients must be sharp in their focus. NBN, for instance, is being “really precise around the postcodes they want to target to drive fibre connect,” David said, and the best clients are being “much more precise and deliberate in their activity.”

The brands and agencies that win will be those that innovate and make ideas quickest, he predicted, as opposed to the wait-and-see game of the past 12 months. “'What's the Reserve Bank doing?', an election year, all those sort of things could force clients into a warm bath,” he said.

“Clients in this kind of economy need to be challenged and pushed by their agency partners. Otherwise, they'd do it themselves.”

They also need to be challenged because they’re shape-shifting, added Cate. “A couple of our clients have really had to reshape themselves, set themselves up for a stronger position.

“The whole conversation is doing more with less. But where it's been much more interesting for us, it's like, 'Okay, we're going to do that. How do we make sure we mirror the way that you guys come to market, and we actually are a true partner versus waiting for reaction?' We've probably been much more front-footed with our clients' problems than we have been in the past, and I think that's probably given us better relationships, better conversations.”

The trio acknowledged it’s taken a while for Dentsu to figure out its proposition - it’s been on its own shape-shifting journey. Kirsty joined in late 2021, and the first year was about stability, “as it always is with mass post-merger integration” and the introduction of the Dentsu Creative brand. 

“We had seven brands when I joined, there were seven creative brands,” she said. “Even though we launched the Dentsu Creative label, we still needed to orchestrate what that really was going to be, and getting back to 'what does good look like?'”

The second year, she focused on “talking about the people, the people, the people, the people, the people”. 2024 was about “strengthening the core.” And 2025 needs to “be about a level of growth in the right way, sustainable growth, the kind of work that we want to be famous for, the kind of work that's going to be enduring and attract clients and make us competitive in the market.

“We've done our time now to have a certain shape of budget next year, we've built it to that point where we've got a pretty healthy position all round that we can really have a good crack of just focusing on the work next year in the right way.”

That will be the job of respected chief creative officer Ben Coulson, who joined in 2023 to replace co-CCOs Avish Gordhan and Mandie van der Merwe, who left after less than a year for Saatchi & Saatchi. Ben has now had a full year to build a creative pipeline, and Cate has seen “the work starting to get a bit better” across the course of 2024.

“We have a mantra inside of our business, which is 'Tier 1 work with our tier 1 clients,'” Cate said. “I will say to you that our tier 1 clients are the clients that we currently have and love and want to grow.

“I think it's time to make our mark a bit more. After three years as a brand new holdco, [we have] permission to introduce ourselves for the first time all over again … I think we're going to almost arrive a little bit to the Australian market.

“We've probably been a bit apologetic about ourselves. We have 20 insanely good clients that we don't shout about enough.”

Kirsty won’t be distracted by a news cycle dominated by competitors: Omnicom buying IPG and creating Omnicom Advertising Group, Publicis merging Publicis Worldwide with Leo Burnett, Accenture launching a media unit and rebadging The Monkeys to Droga5, Mark Green moving out of the local market to New York. Kirsty thinks the latter was the biggest development of the year.

“We need to be laser focused on what we're doing. And I think every time we get distracted from that, we dilute the potency of our product.”

All she wants for 2025 is to deliver on the promise of impact for clients. “That’s all.”

“If we keep talking about what's inside Dentsu, it's a mistake, because what we should be talking about is the impact we have on our clients,” she said.

“Does it really matter what's going on inside of Dentsu, so long as we're delivering on that success for them? That should be the ultimate judge of how successful we are.”