Following the recent and sudden departure of practice president Kim Douglas, Dentsu’s Merkle is heading into 2025 to bring clarity to the market about who Merkle is and what the business does. B&T caught up with CEO of Practices and Products, Kirsty Muddle, and chief commercial officer Paul Whittaker to find out more.
It’s no secret that Dentsu’s CX practice Merkle has had a tough year. Recently, its practice leader Kim Douglas departed the business after only five months in the role.
Although it is unclear why, Dentsu issued a statement suggesting that behavioural issues might have led to Douglas’s demise.
Dentsu has spent the past year restructuring Merkle, which has reportedly led to upwards of 100 staff leaving the business for various reasons.
Kirsty Muddle, the CEO of practices and products, will now oversee the CX practice alongside leaders including chief commercial officer Paul Whittaker, head of experience, strategy and delivery Andrea Meredith, and head of solutioning and architecture Brad Riley.
Muddle admitted to B&T that it’s been a challenging time for Merkle and that although it’s “the kind of disruption we don’t need, we can get past it”.
“There’s a really strong leadership team in there and we have a very clear plan for 2025, and beyond,” Muddle said.
Merkle is responsible for customer experience across the Dentsu business and often works closely with its media and creative divisions to ensure there is an end-to-end solution that moves beyond the effectiveness of great creative and media planning.
“If we’re spending $70 million on behalf of a client on media, we know we need to treat it like our own. We need to drive effectiveness out of that spend and that investment,” Muddle explained.
“And then you know the power of great creativity is a phenomenal driver in effectiveness. This leaves a lasting impact over time, if you have a strong brand and a strong message, you get cut through, and you’re making that media dollar work harder.
“Media and creative are driving people to a brand so they can experience a brand and buy a product. That’s all in vain if you don’t have a good experience, because you’ll lose 70 per cent of that audience if they don’t have a good experience, and that’s really where Merkle comes in.
“Our job is to make sure we don’t lose you at ‘hello.”
Notable work
Merkle doesn’t just focus on consumer experience, it also works on b2b and employee experience. Whittaker cites three recent examples that best sums up what Merkle does.
He said the business has been working with Housing New Zealand for the past 18 months to ensure that it has the right housing stock to support New Zealand, including partnering builders and individuals looking to sell off part of their properties so that Housing New Zealand can build safe homes.
Merkle helped the New Zealand health department roll out its national immunisation program during COVID and has since with them to extend this to other diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella.
In Australia, Merkle has helped the software business MYOB reimagining its brand identity and acquisition journey across b2c and b2b.
“Were using the data and the insights that we have and truly understanding the customer and experience they expect from one-to-one personalised interactions that drives the innovation and the work we do across that partnership,” Whittaker said.
“Some of the work that we’re doing with the likes of Salesforce is really around driving true employee experiences so they have the tools, data and insights to create a personalised customer experience. We do that across a whole raft of sectors.
“And then the external tech work that we do is really around delivering unique web, mobile and commerce experiences in a personalised, tailored to a point in time.”
A new five-year horizon
When Muddle joined the business in early 2022, Dentsu had been on a multi-year journey of acquiring different capabilities and sub-brands, before more recently merging and consolidating them to create a much leaner proposition that has more of a distinctly Dentsu flavour. Their major brands in this market are now the media agency Carat, Dentsu Creative and Merkle.
Like other parts of the industry, Dentsu has endured rounds of redundancies as the cost of living crisis and economic downturn placed pressure on media and marketing budgets.
Today, the Australian and New Zeland business is much closer to Dentsu Japan, where the group is headquartered.
Muddle said years M&As prior to when she joined had “created distractions” for the likes of Merkle to shine internally and also in market.
The next five years, she added, is about bringing clarity around who Merkle is, what the business does and how its work can help clients become more competitive.
“Part of the clarity for 2025 is that we are focused on where we want to be and where we want to go. Equally, there’s a bit of impact on the shape of the team, and there have been some minor cuts,” she said.
“Merkle is a hidden gem and a sizeable business similar in size to Dentsu Creative. It is our desire that we start to offer end-to-end value creation for our clients. So we would be looking at clients that sit in Merkle and whether or not they could be supported by creative and media propositions. Equally, from a media point of view, there’s a natural synergy with Merkle and how we make sure that we’re creating value across the entire experience for our client.
“It’s really important for us to meet the market and, at the very least, get all of these things working together again, because that builds the product that we need and can be famous for, and that we are able to service clients in a modern way.”
