Dentsu

Dentsu: Innovating at Scale: Inside Dentsu’s Digital Transformation

About Dentsu

Dentsu is one of the largest marketing and communications networks, trusted by many of the world's top advertisers to deliver integrated creative, media, and technology solutions. With a 125-year heritage and 68,000 employees operating across 120 markets, dentsu’s mission - “Innovating to Impact” - defines its ambition to create lasting value for clients and society through creativity and innovation. 

When dentsu launched its new go-to-market (GTM) strategy built around this vision, leadership identified employee experience as the foundation for success. To bring Innovating to Impact to life, the company needed a platform that could both connect its workforce and scale innovation across its global locations. 

The challenge

Dentsu’s structure spans six leadership brands and 120 markets, creating a complex network of markets, tools, skills, and content silos. As a result, the business needed a better way to help employees share knowledge and collaborate across regions. 

With it being essential to unite everybody behind a single vision, leadership began a search for a digital platform that could facilitate this. Crucially, it needed to feel local in every market – while still maintaining global coherence. 

The solution

In partnership with Unily, dentsu launched dentsu Dot – a single employee experience platform (EXP) that connects people, knowledge, and culture across the globe in 15 languages. 

Built on Unily’s enterprise-grade platform, (the first platform to be named a Leader by all three analysts, Gartner, Forrester, and IDC), dentsu Dot combines intuitive publishing, automation, social, and native and integrated AI to make collaboration effortless. 

Dot quickly became the foundation for dentsu’s internal transformation – driving alignment and innovation across regions and everyday workflows. 

Connecting Dentsu’s Global Go-To-Market Strategy to Unily 

Dentsu’s global GTM strategy aims to deliver creativity, media, data, and technology as one seamless offering. They used dentsu Dot to operationalize this internally, and it helped drive each pillar of the strategy. 

Spotlight: Easy-to-use CMS for decentralized publishing 

From day one, dentsu prioritized ease of use. With Unily’s intuitive, component-based CMS, even non-technical editors can create rich, brand-aligned content through drag-and-drop design, guided metadata, and pre-built templates. At the same time, built-in governance and workflow controls ensure quality and brand consistency. 

The simplicity empowered over 300 creators and 140 site owners to maintain high-quality local experiences without central bottlenecks. This in turn enables the business to operate at the speed today’s world requires.

Localization was another essential component. With Unily’s AI-powered translation services, Dot delivers content in 15 languages, ensuring every region can communicate authentically - making it easier to engage employees with the wider company goals.

Impact: The shift from centralized publishing to a global network of empowered creators has delivered a 30× uplift in engagement compared to dentsu’s previous intranet. Content management is now a creativity engine that scales. 

Spotlight: Smarter training with Unily Journeys 

Before Unily, training new editors meant manual, one-to-one sessions. With Unily Journeys, every new CMS user is automatically enrolled in a self-paced learning path, complete with certification gates, multi-channel notifications, and gamified progress tracking.  

Automation drives efficiency and effectiveness for dentsu. Every new user completes seven interactive modules before earning CMS access – guaranteeing consistency and saving valuable time for the digital team. 

The automation has since expanded beyond publishing to HR and Marcomms — onboarding new hires, running broadcast training campaigns, and aligning global comms teams.  

Impact: Over 100,000 editors trained, significant time saved for core teams, and new use cases across business functions. Unily’s no-code automation has made it fast to build, easy to measure, and effortless to scale. 

Spotlight: Social + Kudos that Connect Culture 

With Unily, social interaction is woven directly into the employee experience. Likes, comments, communities, and recognition badges exist natively throughout the platform — making connection effortless. Employees can share updates and celebrate colleague wins directly within their flow of work and get a consumer-grade social experience. 

Unily Badges and Kudos are completely customizable. They reflect dentsu’s leadership principles (like Collaboration Kudos and Northstar Award Badges), giving employees meaningful, visible recognition. Mentions in internal news stories automatically appear on personal profiles, while communities like AI Connect have united over 8,000+ employees around emerging topics, from generative AI to innovation sprints. 

Impact: Dentsu Dot has become a social heartbeat for the organization – breaking down silos and embedding recognition in everyday interactions. With Unily’s social capabilities integrated into every corner of the experience, engagement feels natural and authentic. 

Spotlight: Enhancing the enterprise content strategy 

Unily’s enterprise content management tools give dentsu the ability to share and manage large content libraries and reach the right audience at the right time — whether for compliance, sales enablement, or client insights. 

With Mandatory Reads, critical commercial updates (like high-value ad opportunities) reach target sales teams instantly and achieve an 86% daily read rate. This approach replaces rigid compliance tools with a softer, more integrated experience – and is a better driver of meaningful business actions. 

Meanwhile, Unily’s structured metadata and content governance enables dentsu to safely centralize high-value research – from AI to cultural trends – on their Thought Leadership Hub.  

Impact: Dentsu turned its thought leadership from static reports into an active business asset. Employees now have a frictionless way of accessing trusted insights that will help their clients stay ahead of change. This is a textbook example of a strong employee experience impacting the customer experience. 

Spotlight: AI Agent Orchestrator — A Future-Ready AI Strategy 

As one of the first enterprises to adopt Unily’s AI Agent Orchestrator, dentsu is shaping the next era of digital employee experience - where AI becomes an intelligent layer of productivity. Agent Orchestrator enables each query to be routed to the best-fit agent — from knowledge search to workflow automation — with Agent Orchestrator these can all feature within dentsu Dot.

Impact: Employees complete tasks faster and with greater accuracy, setting a new benchmark for operational efficiency in an AI-driven workplace. 

Outcomes with Unily

Dentsu and Unily have delivered a measurable shift in how 68,000 employees connect, learn, and innovate:

• 30× engagement uplift and 128,000 daily page views
• 86% read rate on critical communications
• 68,000 global users unified on one platform
• 140 localized sites in 15 languages
• Dentsu Dot became the first internal platform in dentsu history to win a Gold for transformational impact and is the first internal platform to win the prestigious Grand Prix Awards.

From integrated Social to AI-powered orchestration, dentsu Dot has become the engine of a culture that is truly innovating to impact. 

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