Dentsu expands and consolidates its commerce and retail media offering under new leadership

Beth Ann Kaminkow, CEO of Dentsu Americas who also is the holdco’s chief global client officer, explained that Dentsu has the right pieces in place for a concerted commerce and retail media offering but needed the right leadership to help it all gel effectively for clients that reach that world including Dick’s Sporting Goods and Dollar General.

Kaminkow in the last month brought aboard Jen Bryce as evp of strategic commerce media accounts — also a new position — as well as Jason O’Toole as evp, head of commerce & retail media activation. Both have client side experience, as does Khan.

Kaminkow has a bit of an eye for the discipline given her last role at WPP’s VML where she was global chief commerce officer, as well as CEO of the New York office, before joining Dentsu 15 months ago. She’s definitely looking to bring more consumer-driven insight to the holdco’s commerce media abilities, which is in part why all the hires she made have brand-side experience.

But the advent of AI to influence how its commerce/retail media offering is shaped played a role as well, she said. “We’re able to build [the unit] in a more AI-native way,” Kaminkow explained. “What we think our current client demands and future client demands are as they in-house — what needs to be owned internally in their own organizations — and then as they look at, a new path to purchase, if you will. If you think about direct-to-consumer commerce capability, retail media network capability, media commerce capability, and then what we do through TAG, we’re bringing these systems together in a more cohesive way, but in something that really reflects the needs of the future and how they need to grow their businesses.”

Dentsu’s identity abilities drew Khan to Dentsu, she said, but she plans to flip the script on how to approach consumers and build beyond legacy models. “There’s so much ability and capability to build new solutions, but we have so many existing pockets of excellence at Dentsu, and so we’re not here to recreate connected commerce, total commerce,” said Khan, whose tenure includes stints at L’Oréal and Kenvue. “I’ve spent most of my career orchestrating tactics around across channels. I think Dentsu can leapfrog that model completely and focus instead on the consumer, the connected consumer. So organizing every channel around the consumer rather than organizing the consumer around channels.”

“The future of commerce belongs to organizations that are built around consumer needs rather than channel silos,” said David Young, vp of Dick’s Media Network, the retail media network owned by Dick’s Sporting Goods, which is a Dentsu client. “The ability to connect insights, activation, and measurement across touchpoints helps create a more relevant experience for consumers while driving stronger business outcomes.”

Kaminkow believes there’s the potential to gain on holdco competitors as a fringe benefit of assembling Dentsu’s assets under new leadership. “There are inherent tensions in the big holdcos, especially when you had such deep shopper marketing capability living next to the media capability,” she said. “Despite what they say in all three of the big ones, there are still huge chasms of understanding and of connectedness in in how you operate and what you deliver for the client.”

Time will tell if Dentsu is able to use that as a means of closing the gap with those big three through its commerce offering. But Khan is a believer, at least at the outset of her tenure. “Having worked at multiple holdcos now — I think is my fourth one — what makes Dentsu different is that the entire organization is rallying around me, around this ambition, around Dentsu Commerce. There’s no friction.”