Designing at scale for global brand equity.

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.

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.”

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.”