Creative Production

Dentsu agrees to acquire Tag to grow creative production capabilities

Dentsu Group has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Advent International under which dentsu will acquire Tag Worldwide Holdings Ltd, the global omnichannel digital marketing production powerhouse.

The company says that the acquisition will support dentsu’s strategy of offering integrated client solutions at the convergence of marketing, technology and consulting, uniting the group’s service offerings like never before.

Tag’s digital infrastructure and services will provide high quality content at speed and scale for creative, a scaled personalization engine for customer experience management (CXM), as well as add power to media Dynamic Content Optimization (DCO).

Upon completion, the acquisition will take dentsu’s Customer Transformation and Technology (CT&T) net revenues to 34% from 32% for FY2022. Dentsu has set “Business Transformation and Growth,” as one of the four pillars of its medium-term management plan and one of the priorities is to reach 50% of its revenues from CT&T.

Tag works with leading brands to transform their business and marketing capabilities to deliver content at speed and scale across channels, cultures, and regions. The organization will become dentsu’s sixth network brand and will retain the Tag brand for the foreseeable future.

The acquisition will substantially bolster dentsu’s creative digital production capabilities, adding 2,800 colleagues located across 29 countries around the world, along with ten distinct production hubs.

Tag’s existing service portfolio is structured around three core disciplines: Creative Production (including Digital Video, high-end CGI, moving image, AR / VR and Post-Production), Technology (focused on UX design, website & platform development, Managed Services and Digital Interact (Di)) and Channel Activation (comprising strategic advisory and omnichannel content delivery).

Founded in 1972, Tag was acquired by Advent International in 2017 and has grown significantly following more than €100 million of investment and the successful completion of six acquisitions to further enhance the business’ capabilities.

The company says that Tag’s distributed hub model allows it to be an always-on, end-to-end production partner of choice for 38 of the world’s leading 100 brands, with average client tenure of over seven years. A key foundation of this success is Digital Interact (D)i, a unified martech platform which helps marketers better manage campaigns, access, automate and optimize content, and seamlessly tap into Tag’s global creative production, sourcing and transcreation networks.

Hiroshi Igarashi, President & CEO, Dentsu Group Inc. said, “Tag will truly enable us to scale our CT&T business for global clients with a technology-driven solution. By applying mass-personalization across the three services lines, we will create a best-in-class, horizontal creativity offering. The values that the Tag leadership team have established and nurtured over the past 50 years very much mirror dentsu’s own culture and values, with a shared focus on Social Purpose, DEI and sustainability. We look forward to welcoming Tag to the dentsu family and to our shared success.”

David Kassler, Global CEO, Tag, said, “We can’t wait to start this next phase of our journey and couldn’t be happier to be joining the dentsu family. The market is moving incredibly fast towards integrated services – the combination of Tag’s global technology-enabled content production with dentsu’s broader marketing, technology and consulting skills will be tremendously additive for both sets of our wonderful clients.”

The acquisition of Tag will significantly scale dentsu’s content offering so that it can serve global brands across the entire customer journey, in the most efficient way possible. As the web becomes more immersive, and the dawning of Web3 creates an insatiable hunger for richer, more personalized cross screen content, dentsu and Tag together will provide the perfect modern engine for content creation, distribution and personalization.

Tag will remain a distinct brand within dentsu, will continue to be led by David Kassler, Tag’s Global CEO and will remain headquartered in London, UK.

The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies and is anticipated to close later in 2023 subject to receipt of required antitrust approvals and customary closing conditions. Lazard acted as financial advisor to dentsu in relation to the transaction. Tag will represent approximately 3% of dentsu revenues and adds long-term, contracted revenue streams.