Dentsu International has named longtime McCann communications executive Jeremy Miller as its global chief communications officer, a new role at the holding company. With the post, effective in September, Miller will be responsible for heading a combined U.S. and global communications team.

The hiring comes as Dentsu, the sixth-largest agency holding company based on 2021 revenue, works on integrating creative agencies following a major consolidation across the global organization.

“We really felt there was an opportunity to further accelerate our impact in the U.S.,” said Wendy Clark, global CEO Dentsu International. “Dentsu International is headquartered in London and we are part of Dentsu Group headquartered in Tokyo. So our orientation is sort of set up there.” Clark said that by combining the teams, “we create a center of gravity for communications.”

Dentsu has made some sweeping changes since Clark took the helm nearly two years ago. The company’s global agency brands were consolidated from 160 to six and Dentsu Media shops winnowed from 11 to four.

Then in June, the company united creative agencies DentsuMB, 360i and Isobar into a single entity, Dentsu Creative, under Chief Creative Officer Fred Levron. The move consolidated 9,000 creative employees in 46 markets connected to 37,000 media and customer experience management employees across Dentsu International. 

“When I got here, we had 160 independent entities. We had 250 people with the title CEO. We had all these different systems and platforms, and yet we knew the marketplace was moving toward integration,” said Clark. “We knew that we needed to bring these incredible capabilities that have been acquired together and the opportunity was to do this end-to-end delivery across marketing communications and advertising. That's been the strategy all along, to become the most integrated network in the world.”

Internal to external

Clark said part of Miller’s remit will be to communicate that ambition to outside stakeholders and clients—Dentsu and McCann share General Motors, Microsoft and Mastercard. “The work we've been doing has been highly internal,” said Clark. “We’ve got ourselves to a point where we're much more ready for an external narrative and external reputation-building period.”

“If you're going to look for a leader to lead that phase, I don't think there's one better out there [than Miller]. He’s in a league of his own,” added Clark. “The fact that he sees the potential of what we're trying to do and sees that there's a competitive difference to us says a lot.”

Miller had been with IPG’s McCann for over a decade and prior to taking that role had been with Omnicom Group’s TBWA\Chiat\Day for 15 years. A replacement at McCann has not yet been named.

“To have a bigger playing field where I get to work across media, creative, CXM [customer experience management], and all the tools at Dentsu and help orchestrate that was super enticing,” Miller said. “It's a seamless thing that Dentsu is creating. Any client can come into the house and the services are there. It’s my job to help tell that story in a very clean, cohesive way.”

But that story isn’t just about Dentsu, said Miller. “At the end of the day, our job is to sell clients' products.” 

Not scalable

The move to blend Dentsu’s creative agencies into one entity has not been without controversy, given that it essentially dissolves some legacy brand names. “There’s not this sort of inward—’Oh, we don't have Dentsu McGarryBowen. We don't have Isobar anymore.’ If you're going to do a scale play, neither of those brands were big enough to do a scale play,” said Clark.

“We're trying to build for what's next, which we believe is going to be horizontal creativity, creativity that comes through our creative agencies. We have 80% of our revenue in media and in CX, we want the creativity to come through those agencies. You have to be one entity and one effort and one connected organization. So this is about bringing the creative capabilities in line with where our media and CX capabilities are.”

Better balance

Clark said the consolidation will enable Dentsu to better compete with holding companies that are chasing global accounts with an amalgam of shops to create an integrated offering. “We're in 145 markets and a good amount of our revenue comes from local relationships. They're really important,” said Clark. “The job to be done at Dentsu is that we don't have enough [global relationships]. I'd like more balance.”

And there is potential to get more work from existing clients, which include 91 of the world's top 100 advertising spenders, she said.

“Ninety-one of them are in our portfolio somewhere. We have 11,000 clients, but we don't have one client that is more than 100 million pounds in revenue for us,” Clark said. “So that should not be okay. Our peers would have many more in that regard. So we tend to be more balanced to local and regional, and we've been trying to focus on and grow ... those global partnerships. We’d like them to represent a higher percentage of our revenue, but not all of our revenue.”