The Growth Engine
Andrew McCormick is former Chief Growth Officer at dentsu X, the dentsu group’s global media network. Twenty years from journalism at New Media Age, through editorial roles at Haymarket and The Knowledge Engineers, into agency growth leadership at Essence and then at dentsu X from 2019.
“Mission. Ambition. Culture. The three pillars of a successful agency.”
Andrew McCormick is former Chief Growth Officer at dentsu X, the dentsu group’s global media network and the only major network born in Asia. Twenty years of career across journalism, editorial and agency growth, and one of the clearer voices on what separates agencies that compound from agencies that churn.
McCormick began his career in journalism, covering the media and marketing industries as a reporter at New Media Age from 2005 to 2007. He was there when Facebook opened its first office outside the United States, in London; by his own account he spent time persuading his editor that a new technology called social networking would turn out to matter.
Four years as Deputy Editor of Marketing and Editor of Revolution at Haymarket Publishing, then three years as Editorial Director at The Knowledge Engineers, gave him a platform-level view of the agency and brand ecosystem. In 2014 he moved agency-side, joining Essence as VP of Marketing and Business Development EMEA during the agency’s start-up years; Essence’s mission, to make advertising more valuable to the world, remains the illustration he reaches for when explaining what agency mission looks like in practice.
He joined dentsu X in 2019 and spent seven years in senior growth leadership, most recently as Chief Growth Officer, helping dentsu X grow in Europe and the Americas off the back of a network that originated in Asia. He talks frequently about the Wanamaker formulation applied to AI: fifty percent of the current capability, he believes, is overhyped, and the industry does not yet know which fifty percent.
“The best client you can have is one you already have.”
“Essence’s mission was to make advertising more valuable to the world. That informed every decision we made.”
McCormick’s frame comes from Essence’s start-up years. Mission is the operating sentence a whole company can measure itself against. Ambition is the stretch goal that is reachable only with real effort, so that arrival can be celebrated. Culture is the people equation everything else compounds on top of. Agencies chasing growth numbers without those three tend to be fragile, and the founders he respects most can recite all three from memory.
“A good agency today leads every proposal with an outcome-based model. If growth doesn’t land, we don’t get paid.”
McCormick’s observation from years of CMO conversations is that output-priced fees turn agency work into a cost centre in the CFO’s eye. Outcome-based remuneration puts the agency and the client on the same side of the table: pay for the growth that lands, and only the growth that lands. He argues the best agencies lead their new-business proposals with outcome-based models because it forces both sides to define success up front.
“AI is the biggest change in our lifetime for marketing. And 50 percent of it is overhyped. We just don’t yet know which 50 percent.”
McCormick applies the Wanamaker formulation to AI, by his own admission as a self-described anti-hype guy. He still frames AI as categorically different from the digital or retail-media waves: digital hit performance first, retail media hit point-of-sale, AI touches every process. Search engine marketing, he argues, is the first discipline being meaningfully rewritten. The commercial question for every agency is which tools in the current stack will still be in use five years from now.
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