Client
Hiscox
Tech stack
Google Cloud
Solution
Creative Transformation
Service
AI + Machine Learning
Creative Transformation with AI
Dentsu is a global leader in marketing, media, and creative services, partnering with hundreds of the world’s most influential brands. As the rise of AI continues to reshape the creative landscape, dentsu’s ambition is to amplify the human impact of creativity, leveraging AI to make creative outputs more culturally resonate and performance driven.
The Vision
Dentsu is embedding AI into the highest-value moments of the creative process, building a connected intelligence layer that elevates the quality, speed, and impact of creative output. That means reinvesting the time that automation frees up back into the thinking, ideas, and craft that help brands move at the speed of culture and unlock growth with confidence.
To make this real, dentsu set out to revolutionize the creative production workflow, moving away from disparate systems and lengthy manual ideation processes. The vision was to build a unified, AI-powered platform to move ideas faster from concept to market. Idea Builder brings the entire creative process into one place, from ideation and concepting to evaluation and pitch material development – accelerating the journey from first idea to pitch-ready concepts.
The Challenge
As pitch pressure continues to intensify, higher-quality concepts are needed faster to win. Building and selling a single idea typically requires jumping between multiple disconnected platforms. Feedback is siloed across emails, comments, and separate tools. Creative energy is being wasted on manual repetition and rework rather than the big ideas that move brands. They needed to build a way to eliminate the friction between ideation and execution.
The Solution
Dentsu collaborated with Datatonic to design and deliver Idea Builder, an internal cloud-native, enterprise-grade AI platform built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI (leveraging Gemini, Imagen, and Veo). The solution was centered on creating a unified platform for a seamless workflow across ideation, concept refinement, evaluation, and pitch-ready material development. Idea Builder is trained on dentsu’s proprietary creative methodology, 20+ years of dentsu’s best-in-class craft and creative IP, and industry-leading benchmarks to ensure every idea aims for maximum impact from the start. Features include:
- Start an Idea: Chat with an AI assistant to rapidly iterate on insights, strategy, and creative ideas. The custom assistant is engineered with sophisticated system prompts and chains that inject dentsu’s proprietary creative standards and knowledge base, providing feedback and refinement grounded in specific brand guidelines.
- Refine a Concept: Organize and evolve ideas in a collaborative workspace that structures the ‘big idea’ into a standardized, pitch-ready creative brief format, ensuring consistency, completeness, and the ‘why’ behind the brief.
- Evaluate a Concept: Stress-test ideas using dentsu’s proprietary intelligence methodology and industry-leading benchmarks, grounding each concept in real-world data to identify those with the greatest potential to drive impact.
- Generate Materials: Transform concept data into pitch-ready visuals, including images (via Imagen), videos (via Veo), and audio assets (via Gemini).
“It’s about getting to stronger ideas faster, and reinvesting that time into the thinking and craft that move brands. This isn’t about generating AI ads. It’s about making sure creativity leads.” — Dentsu Creative
Our Impact
Idea Builder is delivering transformative value across dentsu’s internal creative operations:
- Increased Creative Velocity: What once took days, now takes hours, giving teams more time for strategic and conceptual thinking.
- Superior Pitch Quality: Creative output is grounded in best-in-class standards, embedding human craft, industry-leading benchmarks and dentsu’s own performance methodology and best practices.
- Enhanced Control and Security: The custom architecture is designed with enterprise-grade controls, including data segmentation and contractual restrictions on the use of proprietary data for third-party model training. Dentsu is committed to ensuring data is held securely in accordance with industry standards.
By embedding AI into dentsu’s creative systems at the moments that matter most, Idea Builder is delivering outputs 65% faster, giving dentsu’s teams more time for the things that move the work forward.
