The first Dentsu office was a rented Tokyo house, 12 feet wide and 18 feet deep. The business inside it had a wonderfully circular logic. Hoshio Mitsunaga, a former war correspondent, wanted to build a news agency. News was expensive, so in 1901 he also started selling newspaper advertisements to pay for it. The advertising supported the information; the information made the advertising operation more valuable. Two businesses became one in 1907, their telegraphic connection preserved in the name Nippon Dempo Tsushin-sha - eventually shortened to Dentsu.
One hundred and twenty-five years later, the wires are software and the newspaper page is a swarm of platforms, retailers, creators and screens. Yet the old flywheel is recognizable. Dentsu still wants to own the useful connection between knowing what people care about and helping a client reach them. What changed is the number of things that must connect.
The thing it actually sells
Calling Dentsu an advertising agency is accurate in the way calling a department store a counter is accurate. The group plans and buys media, develops brand strategies, makes campaigns and produces content. It also builds customer-data systems, loyalty programs and commerce experiences; implements marketing technology; studies audiences; measures performance; advises on business transformation; and increasingly packages parts of that work in proprietary software.
Its six global leadership brands divide the craft without pretending the client problem is divisible. Carat handles media, content and brand connections. iProspect specializes in performance and digital growth. dentsu X joins media with experience. Dentsu Creative houses the global creative network. Merkle brings data, identity, CRM, commerce and technology. Tag manages production at industrial scale. Around them sit hundreds of group companies in Japan and abroad.
Audience intelligence
Research, identity, customer data and modeled signals describe who matters and what may move them.
Creative & production
Strategy becomes ideas, campaigns, content, experiences and the many variants modern channels require.
Media & commerce
Planning, buying, retail media and performance teams put the work into market and near a transaction.
CXM & measurement
CRM, loyalty, analytics and technology connect behavior back to the next marketing decision.
The buyer is usually a large organization with too many markets, customer records, agencies and internal owners. Dentsu's public work spans Heineken, Pandora, BMW Group, Vodafone, Intel, Microsoft, American Express, P&G, Kraft Heinz and others. The assignments vary from a single piece of work to years-long global relationships. Heineken's renewed media remit reaches 100 markets. Pandora has used a dedicated Experience Lab that links media, performance, customer experience and creative across 36 markets.
“Innovation at dentsu is always in pursuit of an outcome.”Dentsu's description of its operating principle
The seam is the problem
Modern marketers do not lack tools. They lack agreement between tools. One system knows that a customer bought shoes; another serves the ad; a third stores the creative files; a fourth measures a sale; and a fifth asks the team to summarize all of it in a slide deck. The gaps create duplicated production, slow approvals, blunt targeting and reports that arrive after the decision they were meant to improve.
Dentsu's answer is Integrated Growth Solutions, an organizational promise that creative, media and customer experience can be sold and delivered together. The value is not simply having each capability. WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, IPG and other holding companies also own broad networks, while Accenture Song and Deloitte Digital approach the same budgets from consulting and technology. Dentsu's difference is its particular mix: deep Japanese media relationships and consumer knowledge, global media scale, Merkle's identity and experience machinery, creative brands, production capacity and a willingness to build connective products.
This is why the group's internal reorganization matters to clients. In 2023, Dentsu replaced the old split between Japan and international operations with one management team overseeing Japan, the Americas, EMEA and APAC. Global practices followed. In 2026, the EMEA business was simplified into three clusters. The language is managerial, but the intended effect is practical: fewer handoffs before a client can combine a media planner in London, a data engineer in New York and a creative team in Tokyo.
Scale can still behave like drag. Dentsu comprises roughly 140 companies in Japan and about 540 outside it. Integration on an organization chart is not the same as integration in a meeting, a budget or a dataset. The One dentsu project is therefore both its advantage and its homework. If the parts connect, the client buys fewer seams. If they do not, the network becomes another seam.
Now the agency is becoming software-shaped
The clearest expression is dentsu.Connect. Version 4.0, unveiled in April 2026, is described as an agentic AI-powered operating system spanning creative, production, media and experience. It is supposed to automate routine activity, synthesize live data and support continuous decisions while keeping people in control. This is not a standalone SaaS pitch. It is the control layer for Dentsu's service business, meant to make thousands of specialists and client systems behave more coherently.
Other products fill specific moments in the loop. Merkury resolves identity across fragmented customer records and channels. Generative Audiences mixes people-based data with AI signals to simulate groups such as homeowners or early technology adopters, allowing planners to explore an audience before activating media. Idea Builder, built on Google Cloud, gives creative teams a governed workspace for moving from cultural signals to concepts, images and video, retaining conversation history, approvals and cost records.
The graph is editorial and conceptual. It illustrates how the offer connects; it does not represent financial contribution or measured performance.
For clients, the practical benefit is compression. Audience questions that once required a research cycle can be explored quickly. A strong idea can be adapted across markets without recreating every asset. Media signals can influence creative while a campaign is active. Customer data can shape the next message instead of merely decorating the final report. Dentsu makes money through strategic and creative fees, media services, production, technology implementation, data work and continuing managed relationships. The platforms make those services more repeatable and, ideally, stickier.
Human taste in the algorithmic era
There is an obvious hazard. If every agency plugs the same models into the same platforms, speed can produce a great deal of perfectly competent sameness. Dentsu's own language acknowledges the tension: artificial intelligence is paired with “people intelligence.” The interesting part of Idea Builder is not that it can generate an image. Anyone can generate an image. It is that the system is designed to preserve a traceable creative process while a human decides which cultural signal deserves attention and which idea feels specific enough to survive.
That distinction also explains the investment in entertainment and fandom. Dentsu has expanded a Sports & Entertainment practice, worked with the anime brand Azuki, formed a creator-led content partnership with Made By Us Studios and developed a long-term relationship with the East Asia Super League. These are routes into communities where conventional interruption advertising is easy to ignore. The brand participates in a show, a game, a sport or a story people chose, which makes cultural judgment more valuable than another automated placement.
The useful question is not whether AI can make more marketing. It is whether a connected agency can make fewer irrelevant things.
A company built for every new medium
Advertising sales fund Mitsunaga's plan for a news service.
Dentsu exits news and becomes an advertising specialist.
A New York office opens as modern marketing takes shape.
The Aegis acquisition gives Dentsu a much larger global network.
Connected AI products become the new infrastructure layer.
Dentsu has always been unusually close to the pipes. It used telegraphy when telegraphy was new, built around radio and television as commercial broadcasting spread in Japan, opened a New York office in 1959 and acquired Aegis to accelerate its international reach. It also retains the odd rituals of an old institution. Since 1925, employees have climbed Mount Fuji to pray for clients' prosperity and the company's growth. The image is almost too neat: a global organization with contemporary machinery still making an annual ascent on foot.
Its market position is similarly between eras. Dentsu remains an agency holding group, ranked sixth globally in Ad Age's measure cited by the company. Yet it increasingly competes with consultancies, systems integrators, software firms, production networks and commerce platforms. FY2025 consolidated revenue reached ¥1.435 trillion, with net revenue of ¥1.198 trillion. The size gives Dentsu reach; the challenge is converting reach into growth while simplifying a network built through decades of expansion.
There are signs of creative momentum. In 2026, Dentsu won 15 Cannes Lions, four of them Gold, and Carat was named Media Network of the Year. Awards are not a business model, but they matter here because they test the premise: that operational integration need not flatten the work. The more consequential test comes after the festival, when an enterprise client asks whether the same system can connect an insight in one market to content, media, commerce and measurement across dozens more.
The lesson in Dentsu's story is not “be old” or “buy everything.” It is to build intelligence beside distribution and keep rebuilding the bridge between them. Mitsunaga used advertisements to finance news carried by telegraph. Dentsu now uses data and AI to inform messages carried by platforms. The technology is faster; the commercial puzzle is familiar. Know something useful about people, make something worth their attention, and have the machinery to deliver it.