By Michael Bürgi • April 22, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
It’s not an overstatement to say Merkle’s role in Dentsu has been a bit unclear since the Japanese agency holding company consolidated its ownership in the firm back in 2020. Even a few Dentsu executives might admit it — privately.
Is Merkle a data arm like Acxiom is to Interpublic Group, or Epsilon is to Publicis? Is it a digital agency that contributes to and competes with Dentsu’s array of media agencies like iProspect or Dentsu X? Does it fall somewhere in between — or is it something else entirely?
Since 2023 when Pete Stein took over global operations of Merkle, it’s been his job to figure out Merkle’s proper role within Dentsu, then execute the organizational revamp needed to put it to use.
The global president of Merkle and global CXM practice lead for Dentsu said he’s now coming out on the other end of that effort, having moved various non-essential operations of Merkle into other Dentsu units — and now streamlining Merkle to focus on three areas:
CRM and loyalty, content and commerce and data and analytics.
Stein also has brought on new blood to help engineer and codify the changes, including Missy Foristall as the new COO, Dan Knauf as the new chief technology officer, Eric Buss, customer experience & commerce Lead, Americas, and David Novak to head up CRM efforts.
“The truth is, in many ways, Merkle was like a holding company within a holding company,” said Stein, who said an underlying drive is to help clients deliver on personalization but at scale. “With the core of it being data and data-driven performance marketing — that’s the legacy of Merkle — and knowing that we had acquired a lot of capabilities over the past four or five years to cover the entire customer experience, we realized that it made more sense to be a little bit sharper with our positioning and more focused.”
So Stein and co. moved Merkle’s performance media capability into iProspect, and moved performance creative capabilities into Dentsu Creative. That streamlining of capabilities puts Merkle into more direct competition with Publicis’ Sapient, Accenture or even Deloitte, he said — the main difference being, “we were born in data, and then the other capabilities of strategy and design and technology were built up and strengthened over the years.”
Market observers see the changes and generally credit Dentsu and Merkle for understanding that being a holdco within a holdco wasn’t the best way to position the business. “It’s a much more focused entity and offering now … whereas before there was performance, creative and media and and data products,” said Jay Pattisall, vp and senior agency analyst at Forrester.
Pattisall agreed that CRM and data/analytics come naturally to Merkle, but that the challenge for the company is the content/commerce area. “The problem with it is that it’s one step removed from media, and when commerce is one step removed from media, you get less of the multiplying effect as a result,” he said, citing Flywheel’s integration into Omnicom Media Group as an example of interconnecting the two disciplines. “While it does create focus [for Merkle], it creates a one degree of separation from the other capabilities” of Dentsu.
Stein said he believes that with the changes made, Merkle is in fact on its way to getting to the same place. “We’re focused on delivering one Dentsu, and if we have multiple divisions that have the same capabilities, it’s it’s hard for us to work as one team,” he said. “We don’t want that internal friction in place. This reorganizing of the business really helped to straighten that out internally as well.”
Auto rental firm Enterprise has been working with Merkle for a decade, and with Dentsu for 20 years, but appreciates the efforts on the company’s part to simplify.
“This shift has brought better clarity to Merkle’s offering and provided easier access to a more cohesive, centralized, complete solution,” said Paul Reh, vp of global customer experience and digital at Enterprise Mobility. “Merkle now speaks with a single unified voice of expertise and solutions … [The] focus on increasing personalization, transparency and control for customers means they can travel on their terms and have clarity during each step of the process.”
https://digiday.com/?p=576116
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