Embracing change and suffering for transformation: Dentsu’s Jean Lin

Towards the end of October 2023, Dentsu reshuffled its leadership and unveiled a Global Practices structure to centralise its teams and change the face of integrated growth delivery for clients. The entity is led by Jean Lin, global president - global practices, at Dentsu Group.

Dentsu wants to build an integrated, end-to-end solutions unit to drive client growth, while emphasising its commitment to its global leadership brands including Carat, iProspect, dentsu X, Dentsu Creative, Merkle and Tag.

Jean Lin was in India and Storyboard 18 spoke to her about global practices, the top challenges in the business, and her views on Dentsu’s journey so far. She herself has been a Dentsu veteran, having joined Isobar in 2004 following the acquisition of wwwins Consulting, a digital consulting firm she founded in Greater China, eventually becoming Global CEO of Isobar in 2014.

She most recently served as a member of the group’s executive management team. Edited excerpts from the interview:

You set up Global Practices under the Dentsu Group in October. Tell us more about the strategy of setting this up.

This is part of a very important action for Dentsu Group to move into an even more client-centric organisation, to help our clients really to deliver their growth. We have a few key components in the model – we have a very focused management organisation and committee to ensure that we always lead with clients at heart, while proactively thinking of how we can help clients to solve problems.

We also have this global practices where we bring in all the unique and fabulous capabilities together to ensure that we create a learning organisation and also ensure that all the best practices are brought to the client proactively, in a distinctive and connected way, to help clients drive growth and deliver integrated growth solutions.

We have a component called data and tech because we have a lot of data and technology products – this is a key focus area to help our clients deliver the next level of growth in enabling them to deliver a solution. We have a clear data and tech strategy to enable the organisation to grow horizontally.

We have a global delivery unit. Many of our clients are looking at how they can enhance efficiency but also proactively thinking of how they can drive the strategy and growth through our talent. And this global delivery unit is what is really enabling our global growth.

How do your regional CEOs work with Global Practices?

So, we're basically one management team. This is one Dentsu model to have one strategy, one process and one management team. All the regional CEOs are partners for me in Global Practices on how we define the go-to-market and other solutions.

And we work with the regional CEOs on how they implement it proactively and in a relevant way to the local markets. Because not one market is the same. What we want to do is to help our clients assess our capability in a much easier and more consistent way. But we don't want to create a top-down model because sometimes that doesn't work in helping to deliver to our client with agility.

How is it being implemented in India?

India is one of the most interesting players and they are really ahead of time because they have been thinking about this client-centricity over the past few years. So, global practices is really going well. The creative, media and CXM and how they work together. I just had a meeting with them to watch them and how they proactively connect with each other to solve the client's problems.

We are not really bogged down in terms of the organisational structure. We have a mindset of how we can create this value for our clients that are ideas-led, AI-powered and value driven, regardless of where you sit in the Dentsu organisation.

What are the top challenges facing your business today?

The overall advertising market has huge opportunities and challenges because of a few things. Technology has now democratised many of these functionalities. AI is coming into play, which can actually push us in thinking about how we deliver content advertising and solutions in an entirely different way.

The clients want something that is less complex and they want something that is more integrated. This really gives us an opportunity to think of how we organise ourselves, how we deliver solutions, how we come up with innovation, to really drive impact for our clients’ businesses in an entirely different way.

You have been with Dentsu for decades. The group has had a complete overhaul. How do you look at the journey of this transformation?

Dentsu as a company has 123 years of history. We were joking about it the other day. A lot of the things that we have been through from this historical lens of 123 years is like a blink, right?

We need to change. We need to transform ourselves. We need to perform better. And we want to innovate. We want to create impact.

For this to happen, we do need to take the suffering as well to ensure that we transform and really embrace change. That is what's been happening over the past few years. There is a journey that we all are onboarding and we are taking our team with us. There are some colleagues that we really love that are doing different things right now that they never intended to, but we are always and forever grateful for the fact that we actually enjoy the moment with them and create something meaningful while they are here.

I think now we are on a new page. We have a new strategy. We have a new operating model. A lot of our clients are actually telling us how happy they are when we go through the simplification. We have done a lot of hard work in the past few years, and this is a moment we can truly create value for them.

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