Don’t Just See It Feel It
Azlan Raj, CMO EMEA at Dentsu, started his career as a tennis coach and built his marketing philosophy on a single insight: the most powerful thing marketing can do is make someone feel something. When he took the brief, do what we do for our clients, for ourselves, he set about making Dentsu not just visible, but palpable. Including giving it its own scent.
“The brief for me when I went into role was: do what we do for our clients, for ourselves. Put the customer at the heart of everything.”
Azlan Raj is the CMO EMEA at Dentsu, one of the world’s largest agency networks, where he leads marketing across brands including Carat, iProspect, Dentsu X, Dentsu Creative, Merkle, and Tag. A Forbes Communications Council member, Amazon bestselling author, and recognised as a Global Top 50 Performance Marketer, he is one of the most influential voices on customer experience transformation in European marketing.
Azlan began his career as a tennis coach, a role that shaped his understanding of communication across different levels of people and organisations. He moved through digital, performance, data, and strategy, working across consultancies, client side, and agency environments before joining Merkle, which was subsequently acquired by Dentsu. He spent eight years at Merkle in progressively senior marketing and customer experience roles, building the EMEA marketing capability before stepping into the CMO UK&I role for Dentsu in 2023 and expanding to CMO EMEA in 2024.
His mandate when he joined was a clear and deliberately challenging brief: apply to Dentsu the same principles Dentsu applies to its clients. That meant centralising the marketing team, conducting audience research using Dentsu’s own capabilities, and rebuilding the content, events, and ABX (account-based experiences) programme around what clients actually needed rather than what the business wanted to say. He also ring-fences a portion of his marketing budget for an innovation fund pitched Dragon’s Den style by his team.
“Marketing is when your audience can feel the brand before they see it.”
“I didn’t want people just to see Dentsu. I wanted people to feel Dentsu.”
When Azlan launched Seicho, Dentsu’s annual event, he filled the space with a cherry blossom scent, built a creative cherry blossom tree installation, and designed every staging element to evoke a specific feeling. Not a reaction. A feeling. His argument is that the most enduring thing a brand can do is create a sensory memory, something people associate involuntarily with the brand when they encounter it elsewhere. He is now developing a licensed Dentsu scent to use at events, in offices, and potentially in out-of-home advertising.
“We’re not going to every event for the sake of it. Just like we’re not entering certain awards.”
Most organisations spread their event presence across too many touchpoints and then wonder why none of them move the needle. Azlan’s approach is the opposite. Every event, every award entry, every piece of thought leadership has to justify itself against a clear purpose. The result is fewer activations done with significantly greater impact, a bigger presence, a stronger brand impression, and a more coherent through-line from event to always-on content.
“I always hire for character. It trumps skill set, and yesterday’s skills may not be today’s.”
The speed at which marketing capabilities evolve makes technical skills a depreciating asset. What holds its value is the disposition to break muscle memory, adapt to the new, and approach the unfamiliar with a proactive mindset. Azlan looks for people who can ask whether a skill that worked last year still belongs in the playbook today, and who are genuinely comfortable with the answer being no.
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