Patricio De Matteis, CEO of dentsu ANZ, brings over 25 years of experience in marketing, digital, and consulting industries. He has held leadership roles across major organizations such as Cognizant, PwC Australia, and Accenture Interactive, where he played a pivotal role in scaling the business.
With a deep understanding of both the client and consulting sides from his time at Coca-Cola and Kellogg’s, De Matteis is known for driving sustainable growth and building high-performing teams.
But he too often flies below the radar, making him one of the most elusive figures in the industry today. In this Fast 10, De Matteis unpacks his career, vision for dentsu, the future of digital transformation and the value of mentorship.
1. In your 25 years, you’ve had a varied and diverse background, consultants/client side. What lured you to Dentsu?
De Matteis: I’ve admired, followed and competed with dentsu, and all its core global brands, for at least 15 years.
When I running diverse businesses across Asia Pacific, we were focused on working at the forefront of digital transformations and I was always impressed at the innovation heritage that dentsu had, which was omnipresent across their brands, their people and their work. And yes, I definitely poached a few leaders from dentsu across Asia Pacific to build teams around our business.
So, I’ve been following dentsu and its history, but more importantly the work and the people, for years.
2. You have spearheaded major digital transformations, as an industry are we moving quickly enough?
De Matteis: For me, it’s less about speed and more about ensuring the right value is being extracted because of the transformation.
Clients generally are not getting a robust enough ROI from their digital transformations. They definitely are not extracting the value up stream or even downstream, plus the systems that they are implementing are quite static and not necessarily evolving real time and they’re poorly connected from an ecosystem to attract the right level of customer data/insight, they don’t really understand where consumers are actually consuming physically and digitally, they don’t look at that divide or the blend of how they consume and where they connect.
As a result, I would say that as an industry, we have a huge opportunity to help our clients extract value from those digital transformations.
3. How do you embed innovation in everything you do?
De Matteis: By challenging the status quo, each of our teams are incentivized to rethink the client brief and problem. Our strength in consumer insights and industry knowledge actually helps us have a point of view and challenge the brief and problem. Drawing on our unique mix of skills from our cross-functional brand teams that come together to provide truly an integrated solution to that brief or problem and how we then sweat the execution so that our client can truly win, which is when we win. And of course, and perhaps the most important, constantly sharing and evolving what good looks like with our teams as well as our clients.
4. With your degree in Anthropology has it helped you understand humanity better, especially challenging clients?
De Matteis: Anthropology is all about the the study of human societies, their cultures and how they’ve developed and what attracted me to dentsu is its DNA in understanding consumer behaviour, understanding trends and translating that for our clients.
Anthropology has enabled me to work with our teams to really tap into consumers and get nuggets of insight to drive innovation.
My degree has definitely helped me across my career to build unique brands and teams that embrace diversity of skills and a love for pushing boundaries.
It’s understanding where we’ve come from and understanding the systems that exist, that move societies and cultures forward.
5. As an industry what’s one thing you would change to make us all better?
De Matteis: As an industry we could do better to bridge the gap between creative, media and technology companies, and pushing partnership to the next level.
6. During your career have you had mentors/champions that have been influential in your career development?
De Matteis: Yes, and they are still my mentors!
I still connect with my university professor, with my first boss in marketing at Unilever and I still connect with colleagues I’ve had the opportunity to work with across data, technology and creative business. It never stops.
It’s an area that I’m also proud of is having mentored better professionals than myself who continue to reach out and connect and share new ideas and thoughts.
Having that sort of connection in this day and age which is boundaryless in terms of geographic location, the beauty is we have all these connections at our fingertips and I’ll always be making sure to remain in contact with people who can help me become a better version of the person I am.
7. You are passionate about building high-performance teams what’s the one factor that drives its success?
De Matteis: Having a clear vision and clarity of purpose is key to any high-performance thing.
The essence is that obsession with leaving the client in a better place than you found them. With that sort of obsession, it never finishes, at dentsu we’re in the trenches with our clients, shoulder to shoulder every day, striving for success.
8. With the current economic headwinds, are your clients still investing for sustainable growth?
De Matteis: There has definitely been a shift in terms of client investment. We’ve all seen that in the past six to eight months across short term client initiatives, with some large scale sustainable digital transformations delayed. We’ve seen a core shift in spending to drive more immediacy and short-term ROI.
9. What’s one thing that’s not on your LinkedIn profile?
De Matteis: I guess my human side, the love for my three beautiful, grown kids. They’re all such unique individuals, some of them are here in Australia and some have moved overseas. I am so proud of the people they have become and the love and support they give me now as young adults.
10. Important last question, do your parents know what you do?
De Matteis: Yes, they do. My dad was in consumer good businesses all his life and he embedded that passion for marketing and connection with consumers brands in me. While mum has always been close to the business decisions I’ve made. They’re both great mentors, though they would like me to be living a bit closer to them.
