Dentsu’s Jacki Kelley on her expanded client remit in the wake of a parent company restructure

By Michael Bürgi

Only a month ago, longtime media veteran Jacki Kelley received a vote of confidence from her boss, Dentsu Group CEO Hiroshi Igarashi, when he asked her to handle the vital role of global chief client officer, on top of her current duties as CEO of Dentsu Americas.

The task was given to her amidst a restructure at the agency holding company that saw the Dentsu Japan mothership become one with Dentsu International, which represented the rest of Dentsu’s operations across the globe. Igarashi-san, as all Dentsu employees refer to their global CEO, has entrusted Kelley with a key role: to help unify and strengthen Dentsu’s client relationships and foster those especially with multinational clients including American Express, Mondelez, Coca-Cola and Marriott.

Kelley, who has decades of experience in both holding companies and major media firms (including Bloomberg and Yahoo), took the promotion in stride, attributing it in part to the fact that a majority of those clients are headquartered in the U.S., which is under her control.

Still, challenges and opportunities lie ahead, and Kelley shared her thoughts on some of them with Digiday.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and space.

What were the highlights and lowlights of 2022 for you at Dentsu?

Our largest clients continue to grow. In my case, eight of our top 20 clients grew double digits just in the last quarter, and it’s across other capabilities. Our fundamental belief is, clients want fewer agencies solving much bigger problems. And we see this in the consolidation reviews that are going on — the desire to reduce complexity. So we have really retooled ourselves to deliver on that. And when we see our largest clients growing across capability, that is a really strong indicator for us. So that was that’s a point of pride. If you look at our top 100 [clients] globally, more than 85% of those work with us across at least two of our service lines.

Does that approach limit you to only larger clients who can afford such wide capabilities?

Dentsu is so different and distinct because it’s been built through acquisition since 2011. We might be the oldest [holding company] formed in 1901 In Japan, but internationally we are in our teen years, and barely. You could argue we’re an adolescent.

The last three years have been focused on completely changing the plumbing of how we work. I think that is fundamentally different — and I think I have credibility saying that, because I’ve worked with every other holding company as a media owner, and I’ve been inside one of them [IPG, as North American CEO of Mediabrands until 2014]. We welcome all sizes of clients. Candidly, some of the smaller clients need even more of this level of integration, because they simply don’t have teams on their side that are helping to drive that. So our ability to really be an extension of them across an end-to-end capability is just as needed as it is …read more

Source:: Digiday