Dentsu & Newton Partnership: Cannes conversation with Emily Kennedy & John Hoctor

Newton and dentsu announced their partnership at Cannes this year. In this conversation, Emily Kennedy explains what made Newton different from the rest of dentsu's tech stack, and what changed once agents started doing real work across direct and programmatic.

Connecting the lanes

dentsu works with partners across the entire tech and measurement landscape, but most of them operate in lanes — a specific channel, a specific buying mechanism. What stood out about Newton, Kennedy says, is the ability to connect those systems to each other and to clients' own stacks.

"Consumers don't know the difference of how an ad is served," she notes. Direct and programmatic are different beasts on the buying side, but Newton knows both models well enough to bring them into a single connected media plan — different channels, different KPIs, one data story back to the client.

AI for a superhuman agency

dentsu describes itself as a superhuman agency: the best of AI paired with people who know their brands, consumers, and media best. In that framing, Newton's job is to get those people out of manual data pulls and reporting so they can spend their time on strategy and the consumer.

On the question of agents recommending versus agents doing, Kennedy is clear that people stay in the driver's seat. dentsu is deliberately building trust with the agents over time — the power is in what agents surface and execute, but the strategy remains human.

Supply path optimization, finally reactive

The industry has talked about SPO for a decade, and most of it is still manual — turning exchanges on and off, with a good analyst going one layer deeper. The data is too massive for humans to react to in real time.

With agents on it, dentsu is curating inventory against real-time performance trends and cultural moments rather than a static data point. The early result: efficiencies, and inventory conversations that connect to total value and client outcomes instead of staying an efficiency game.

The agency of the future

Kennedy's answer is the throughline of the whole conversation: the agency of the future is superhuman. AI makes the people more data-informed and faster; the people remain the differentiator.

Read more about the Newton x dentsu partnership here.

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