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Designing at scale for global brand equity.

Dentsu unifies branding with Adobe Express to enable 68,000 employees to create with confidence.

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DENTSU

Established 1901

Employees: 68,000

Tokyo, Japan

www.dentsu.com

1.5 hours

saved on average per social post

Products:

Adobe Express

Adobe Firefly

Adobe Creative Libraries

Adobe Stock

Adobe Illustrator

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Objectives

Create a brand hub to leverage the power of a global agency brand

Empower marketers and designers to collaborate and accelerate content creation

Build brand equity by driving creative consistency across the organisation

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Results

70% faster time to market by enabling marketers to create their own content

Up to 1.5 hours of time saved on each creative asset

Brand consistency drives increased brand equity and trust

When tradition meets cutting-edge innovation.

The challenge of balancing creativity and efficiency can confound some creative leaders, but not Sakura Martin. Possessing a rare combination of right-brained creativity and left-brained business savvy, Martin relies on her background in both graphic design and business as the global head of brand and design at dentsu, a 120-year-old Japanese marketing, consulting, and technology company. Her role is to protect and evolve the brand — a task requiring both creative vision and structured execution.

Over the last 15 years, dentsu has expanded through acquisitions into a multinational business with more than 11,000 clients, including most of the world’s top 100 advertisers, and a global presence in 120 markets. As it matured, new challenges emerged — particularly the need to scale visual content efficiently and consistently across diverse channels, markets, and audiences. To begin leveraging the power of a global agency, dentsu consolidated its 160 brands into six leadership brands under a single umbrella with a powerful visual identity.

Martin’s challenge was to implement this new brand identity across a company of 68,000 employees. Drawing on dentsu’s Japanese heritage — where tradition meets modern technology — she focused on practical ways to scale creativity and increase efficiency. Artificial intelligence plays a key role in dentsu’s overall strategy. Through its partnership with Adobe GenStudio, dentsu is not only scaling content production — it’s unlocking new levels of creativity, speed, and efficiency for its client-facing teams. The collaboration gives the agency the ability to deliver highly personalised, on-brand content at scale, helping clients stay ahead in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.

Martin also has a background in innovation, creativity, and boundary pushing, merging talents in graphic design with business acumen. That’s what led her to Adobe Express. Adopted in 2023 to address challenges around brand consistency and efficiency, the platform has quickly evolved into a core component of dentsu’s global marketing strategy today. Martin’s team has seamlessly integrated Adobe Express into everyday workflows, enabling teams across regions and functions to create on-brand content with unprecedented speed, consistency, and creative freedom.

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A core component of that brand evolution was the creation of a brand centre — “the dentsu brand hub” — that houses essential brand assets and links to Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries and the Adobe Express social media and email template library. Having this unified resource has since reduced time to market by 70% by giving design and marketing teams the ability to produce brand-aligned content faster, thanks to reusable, accessible, on-brand templates.

Starting with a test group of 20 users, Martin’s team fine-tuned the creative process for templates before scaling these production efficiencies to hundreds of non-creative users across the company, making her expertise in both design and operations more important than ever. The ultimate goal of these and other templates is faster time to market and brand consistency at scale, which lays the groundwork for higher brand equity and increased loyalty and engagement — a significant achievement for dentsu’s visually complex brand.

“Our top priority is to build worldwide equity in the dentsu brand,” says Martin. “We do that by driving brand consistency across the business and establishing a globally recognisable brand identity. This is essential to create trust between dentsu and its clients, including potential future clients and partners.”

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“Our global brand hub is a true unified solution that brings everything together. It’s our one-stop shop for anything brand and design-related. Everything is accessible from this one point which is hugely valuable.”

Sakura Martin

Global Head of Brand and Design, dentsu

The challenge of showing up consistently.

Before implementing Adobe Express, Martin’s team faced two main obstacles — starting with brand disparity throughout the company.

“Across our website, our social channels, and our internal channels, we had loads of content with different messaging and visual identities,” says Martin. “Showing up consistently was a real challenge for us.”

The second obstacle was a lack of alignment among teams around the world. As dentsu’s strategy evolves toward a more integrated client offering, the importance of the dentsu brand and brand alignment across teams in multiple brands and markets is more important than ever before. This structural diversity, while powerful for specialisation, made it challenging to maintain brand cohesion across markets. Martin’s team of five provides brand and design support to all of them and to regional communications teams across four regions: the Americas, EMEA, APAC, and Japan.

This structure allowed the team to centralise brand management, but they found a gap between marketers who tend to work in Microsoft PowerPoint and Word, and designers using solutions within the Adobe Creative Cloud. Working in two separate ecosystems slowed down collaboration. As Martin’s team implemented the new brand across the company, they needed a way to bridge the gap between these teams while also taking into account the complexity of different regions and languages.

Adobe Express solved both challenges. Graphic designer Max Bloom created templates the team could use for assets, including social media posts, emails, posters, and more. Locking the templates safeguarded critical design aspects like logos, fonts, and brand colours while still allowing users to customise text and visual elements.

Martin’s team collected all the templates into a number of Creative Cloud libraries which are accessible to all dentsu employees via Adobe Express, along with the brand templates created in Microsoft apps, making it easy for both marketers and designers to work in their platforms of choice and use the latest brand assets. The brand library is also populated with commercially safe Adobe Stock photos to give users choice and variety.

“Our global brand hub is a true unified solution that brings everything together,” says Martin. “It’s our one-stop shop for anything brand and design-related. Everything is accessible from this one point, which is hugely valuable.”

Creating on-brand content at scale.

Now a standard across dentsu, Adobe Express and the dentsu brand hub are not only being rolled out across all 68,000 employees but scaled across the leadership brands as well — Carat, iProspect, dentsu X, Dentsu Creative, Tag and Merkle — which are now in the process of building and sharing their own template libraries. Martin’s team serves as brand guardians, enabling teams to produce high-quality assets without relying on a traditional design process.

Social media templates include more than 150 assets for specific kinds of news and updates, such as award wins, new hires, and client wins. There are also quote cards and reports highlighting carousel posts, and all assets are sized for various social channels, from Instagram to LinkedIn. Users can add video clips and music to bring posts to life.

There’s also a template for “dentsu jin”, a global multimedia social campaign highlighting what it’s like to work at dentsu as a means to build internal culture while enhancing dentsu’s brand externally. The template mixes images, video, voice notes, and animation, giving markets a wide variety of options for showcasing employees’ personalities.

“It was key for this template to be easy to use because otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to get that consistency,” says Martin. “People can drag and drop their content into the template, and it’s a campaign they enjoy being a part of.”

“Adobe Express saves at least one hour to an hour and a half per asset, which adds up to a lot, and we expect to see this time savings increase exponentially over time.”

Sakura Martin

Global Head of Brand and Design, dentsu

When Martin’s team brought Adobe Express to the Global Communications Network of 300 marketers, the response was immediate and positive. They used templates in the brand library to create on-brand content at scale and still show up across every region and platform while still delivering consistent quality.

“Adobe Express is so easy to use,” says Martin. “It’s really intuitive, and you don’t need to watch long videos to learn how to use it. As soon as people are aware of the templates and libraries, they easily get on with it.”

Next, Martin’s team expanded to function teams, including human resources. They used Adobe Illustrator to create templates for internal HR campaigns for activities like end-of-year reviews and goal setting, which the HR team could access and utilise through Adobe Express and internal software. HR teams in market also use the translation tool within Adobe Express to convert text into different languages right within the template.

Another critical implementation was at Seicho, the dentsu UK&I flagship event series designed to explore innovation and brand development in a rapidly evolving landscape. To ensure consistent and engaging social media coverage, the EMEA marketing team leveraged Adobe Express. They developed a comprehensive library of branded templates tailored for the event, enabling team members across various regions to efficiently produce and share content that resonated with the event’s themes and maintained brand integrity.

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This strategic approach resulted in a cohesive and dynamic online presence throughout the event. The use of Adobe Express allowed for rapid content creation, significantly reducing the time required to produce high-quality visuals. This efficiency not only enhanced the team’s ability to engage with the audience in real time but also freed up resources to focus on other critical aspects of event promotion and coverage.

“We’ve seen instant improvements in workflows,” says Martin. “Adobe Express saves at least an hour to an hour and a half per asset, which adds up to a lot of time as more people adopt these templates. We expect to see this time-saving increase exponentially over time.”

This time-saving frees Martin and her team to focus on high-impact work, including designing global communications campaigns, refining brand elements, and creating additional templates. Collaboration with other teams is also made easier by allowing multiple editors to work on an asset at once and communicate through comments.

Pushing creative and technological boundaries.

The dentsu culture of innovation gives Martin the freedom to push creative and technological boundaries in her quest to find the best creative tools and scale them to the rest of the company. That includes bringing in cutting-edge AI through Adobe Firefly, which her team uses to create imagery for early-stage ideation and mockups to communicate ideas faster and better.

Martin’s next steps include scaling Adobe Express to additional teams and doing more with video templates. Martin is also working with Adobe to push the capabilities further through new features, such as an integrated brand approvals process.

In the meantime, Martin is enjoying the brand consistency she sees as she browses dentsu social media. Where she used to feel frustration when encountering the wrong branding, fonts, and images, she now feels a sense of calm seeing the correct brand colours, fonts, and logo fixed in its place in the corner of each post — and the satisfaction of knowing that consistency is quietly building brand equity and value.

Learn how Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly can help you build brand equity through consistency and creativity.

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