A joint venture with marchFIRST: consulting for the internet age (2000)

Stepping outside the brokerage of advertising space

This joint venture was an early attempt by a company that had grown on brokering advertising space to set foot in a line of business outside it. The ability to lock up television inventory was an overwhelming strength in a market that only went up. But as the internet spread and advertisers began asking hard questions about return on spend, securing space was no longer enough: what was needed was the capacity to advise on corporate strategy itself — and to the structural change that contemporary media had captured in 1998 as “the king at a crossroads,” Dentsu can be seen responding not by building in-house but through a joint venture.

The fact that the partner it chose went bankrupt at home also shows how difficult crossing borders is. The venture could not hold the equal-shareholding design it had started with, and Dentsu lost early the counterpart it was meant to learn American know-how from. That it nonetheless kept the Japanese entity alive suggests Dentsu had not let go of the direction of travel — from advertising agency to full-service consultancy. Whether this groping became the groundwork for the later move into digital, or remained a one-off attempt, is measured in the subsequent changes to Dentsu’s business mix.