Dentsu has undergone a shift in top management on a global scale, with new global CEO Takeshi Sano in charge of an agency holding company that sits just under the Big Three — Publicis, Omnicom and WPP — but has taken its lumps over the last few years as it tries to stay ahead of Havas and a raft of smaller holdco and independents clamoring to grow their businesses.
Although the company has seen some executive turnover in the Americas, Beth Ann Kaminkow has now been in place as the CEO for the entire region for more than a year. She’s also charged with leading client service as global chief client officer. Meantime, at her side on the media end of Dentsu is a longtime Dentsu vet, Will Swayne, who’s global practice president of media and integrated solutions but has a long tenure within media agency Carat.
The two executives sat down with Digiday’s editor-in-chief Jim Cooper and senior editor Michael Bürgi for a wide-ranging conversation on how they’re adapting AI into Dentsu’s processes, as well as what to expect in this upfront market that’s getting underway.
The following conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
What are the issues that you want to make sure your clients are protected on in light of the big shifts in this upfront?
Swayne: This is a really important upfront, because I think that the agency dynamics have changed, with a different agency ecosystem from prior years. I think that macro economic elements are absolutely playing on clients’ minds at the moment, so ensuring that there’s flexibility within those upfront commitments to make sure that they can adapt to whatever happens in world economics.
It really feels like agentic is front and center, right now, of everyone’s agendas — the partners’ agendas, the agency’s agendas, the client’s agendas. Navigating through this upfront in terms of looking at the next 12 months, we know the impact is is going to be very real from an agentic standpoint. How are we building and designing for that? As we go into it, we’re very much looking at the investment that we’re making on behalf of our clients, ensuring that it lines up to those trends that we see within the marketplace, and then all enabling us to be able to navigate through that.
Kaminkow: One of the things that really impresses me about what the agentic capability enables now is, it’s not linear anymore. Things that would typically have happened even with a single team and would’ve been sequential, is now happening simultaneously. I think that is what is also creating a different kind of intelligence from what’s being generated.
This is the most programmatic upfront ever. What’s your take on that and what that means when you blend AI into the programmatic skew?
Swayne: The Merkle play we made was to go out and build an identity graph earliest. None of the other holding companies were the first to do that. We did that in 2016. We believe that we have such strong media chops and programmatic chops as a result of it to be able to understand that addressability within the marketplace. As we’re going into this upfront, we see that as a huge opportunity for us. Look at our digital performance capabilities as an agency group, the way that we brought together iProspect, Merkle media, 360i, we have such a strong pedigree within this area that we see it as a real competitive advantage going into it. We’ve been driving the shift to programmatic and the shift to performance for many years now within this upfront process. We definitely see some partners leaning into that more than others, and those are the ones that we’re leaning into.
Is speed of importance to the client, as much it is as it is to you, in order to be more efficient?
Swayne: it is the absolute battleground at the moment, and for all categories. The application of AI and agentic to the business. With all kinds of investors looking at it at the moment, that that is where the value is. For anyone to show an accelerated application of agentic to their business right now will be a new story within their business and for them to their markets.
Kaminkow: Without compromising the quality … If you know your client is doing what they should be doing as well, especially places where they own some of the data themselves. It is absolutely on us, and we want to make sure that we’re never the weak link in it.
Clients are looking for their agency partner to be out ahead in core expertise areas like media and marketing. What I’ve heard from a lot of clients is, every business right now is going through their own AI future readiness. There’s a decision being made, if you think about the costs and the investments — and this is where I feel very bullish on agencies, and I don’t see this being written about enough. This is our core service, this is our core expertise. And even the clients that are dabbling in it a bit at some point are going to say, ‘We have to focus on what is core to what we deliver for our consumers, and we have to have partners that are building the best in class expertise from a technology tooling standpoint that I can count on.’ I feel like that was part of how the Heineken decision was made. [Dentsu recently won the brewer’s media business.]
Are high-trust clients like financial services and health care further ahead in AI?
Kaminkow: We’ve had these technology clients [including Adobe] who are already embedded in the AI space. Being customer zero with them as a client and an agency partnership, and then delivering that in a co joint way to the other businesses that we both serve collectively has been a real advantage for us. To your point about these categories like financial services and health care, I don’t know if they’re always out ahead, but I think the protectiveness and the risk mitigation that is being applied to them is probably way more mature than a lot of other companies.
What’s the critical interrogation point at which humans remain involved in the process?
Kaminkow: When you think about how roles are transforming through this too, you’ve got the concept of human in the loop, but you also have the concept of human above the loop, especially as you get to fully end to end agentic. And so it’s bringing in people who understand that more orchestrator, end to end capability that they can apply to what they’re both designing for, and what’s coming out on the back end and what they’re delivering to clients there. It’s a completely different talent.
What is that person called? What’s their title?
Kaminkow: We’ve been talking a lot about that. Is it an orchestrator or an architect?
Swayne: In the old world, it was a planner. A planner would take the brief, and they would run it all the way through.
Kaminkow: I like how we return to comms planning there too. Because it’s not just a single type of a strategist. It’s an understanding about the whole end to end process.
Color by numbers
Ten years ago, the Association of National Advertisers blew a hole under the water line of SS media agency with its K2 Report, that detailed all manner of hidden and non-transparent activity media agencies were up to, from hidden rebates from publishers to principal media usage clients were unaware of. On June 1, the ANA is bringing together several of the architects of the K2 report to discuss how far the industry has come and how far it still needs to go. “The biggest improvement has been awareness, as basic as that sounds,” said Bill Duggan, ANA’s evp. “Many of our members don’t know what they don’t know … We’ve been trying to educate [them on] the importance of updating contracts and having the right clauses in those contracts.” The organization also surveyed 126 ANA members, of which 108 passed the screener question (“Do you have at least a working knowledge of your company’s relationship with its media agency?”) to find out the following stats:
- 56% have updated their media agency contract within the past year; 89% within the past two years. However, updates have not consistently addressed the most critical issues;
- 54% have updated their contract to specifically address rebates (18% say no; 28% don’t know);
- 61% have updated their contract to address principal media (16% say no; 23% don’t know)
- 43% of advertisers in 2026 have concerns about the level of transparency with their media agencies, down slightly from 46% in 2014;
- Among those with concerns, 49% say their concerns have increased over the past year — up from 42% in 2014.
Takeoff & landing
- Korean electronics giant Samsung awarded Cheil India its media business following a review, while in Australia, incumbent Clemenger BBDO has dropped out of that creative and media review. Reports indicate that Publicis is favored to win it there, given it handles most of the rest of Samsung’s media and creative work.
- Account moves: There’s a lot of other media movement in India: Publicis’ Zenith won L’Oréal’s media business from WPP Media’s Wavemaker; and Havas Media won the media business for Matrimony.com.
- Personnel moves: Mediaplus named Costin Mihaila to be global chief market officer, coming over from EssenceMediacom where he had been global client president until the end of 2025 … Christian Juhl, former CEO of WPP Media (then called GroupM) has joined AI firm Akkio’s board of directors … WPP Production promoted Santiago Sánchez-Lozano to CEO for EMEA, adding the rest of the European continent to his duties beyond central Europe … Horizon Media’s Blue Hour Studios hired Kristen King as managing director, coming over from ATTN:, where she was chief experience officer.
Direct quote
“I’ve been saying for some time that we don’t have a CTV frequency or a linear frequency problem; we have a TV screen frequency problem that impacts consumers, advertisers, and publishers. When a consumer gets 14 frequency on linear and 2 frequency on CTV, that’s annoying to the consumer, that’s wasted spend for the advertiser, and it’s a missed monetization opportunity for the publisher.”
— Research veteran Howard Shimmel, president of Janus Strategy and Insights, in fellow research vet Bill Harvey’s MediaVillage column.