Manulife has hired Dentsu for global media and creative following a competitive review that lasted six months. The 134-year old insurance company operates as John Hancock in the U.S. Manulife previously used various agencies with responsibilities based on the market and offering, according to Global Chief Marketing Officer Karen Leggett. Dentsu will create a dedicated team for the account.

Dentsu previously held some creative and media business in Asia, so the win marks an expansion of its remit, according to a Dentsu spokeswoman. 

Dentsu operated as the company’s Canada agency-of-record before Deloitte Digital’s Heat was named lead global creative agency and WPP’s m/SIX and Wunderman Thompson took on global media planning, buying and analytics in 2017. Heat, m/SIX, and Wunderman Thompson weren’t immediately available for comment

According to Leggett, Manulife was looking for an agency that was data-driven and had a global footprint in Asia, where the company has seen significant growth. "We also wanted a partner that shared that similar excitement for customer obsession and for digital transformation," adding that with Dentsu, "we felt there was a real meeting of minds around this concept of customer obsession and how that needed to translate into the creative.”

The company is also looking to promote assets and products like its behavioral insurance products, which are called Vitality in the U.S and Move in Asia. Leggett said those products haven’t had a clear message geared towards consumers in the past. This is part of a larger vision for the company’s brand strategy moving forward.

“We need to speak with one voice with a very clear and compelling global brand strategy, but that has the ability to come to life in a localized and personalized way in the different geographies in which we operate,” Leggett said.

Bringing on Dentsu is part of Manulife’s ongoing digital transformation that began in 2018, Leggett added. The company has been investing in global digital companies like Haodf.com, a China-based online medical platform, over the past few years.

Leggett did not disclose Manulife's ad budget. The company as of September had $1.1 trillion in assets under management globally. In the U.S., John Hancock’s measured media spending fell from nearly $25 million in 2019 to nearly $3 million in 2020, according to Kantar.

Jeff Greenspoon, president, global solutions at Dentsu, credited the holding company's revamped integrated model under global CEO  Wendy Clark.

"We've been investing a lot of time and energy and resources on building our global capability around integrated agency models,” he said. For the Manulife brief, the holding company did "an analysis of the category, analysis of the brand, the geographic footprint, and all the different product and service categories to start to map our business from both a capability and expertise perspective to the geographical needs of the business,” he said.