Why DEPT® Is Celebrating 10 Years by Positioning Itself Around ‘Growth Invention’
Global marketing services and technology company DEPT® is marking 10 years of growth with a refreshed vision to help clients find new, fast, and unexpected ways to unlock growth.
DEPT®’s new positioning as The Growth Invention Company is powered by its proprietary Growth Invention Framework. This structured approach combines marketing, technology, and data to enable clients to invent, test, and scale.
DEPT®’s repositioning reflects the company’s own growth trajectory over the past decade. With 4,000 specialists across 30 offices worldwide, DEPT® applies Growth Invention across AI, brand and media, customer experience, commerce, technology, and CRM – delivering measurable growth for some of the world’s most ambitious companies, including Google, Lufthansa, Snap, Coach and OpenAI.
Global chief executive officer Dimi Albers has been on that journey since day one and reflects on the first decade of the Dutch-born company in broad strokes. He says “The general direction of travel for our business since the start has been to build something that’s a great alternative to what’s already in the market – something unique that can help clients grow in many different ways faster than their competitors.”
From the start, DEPT® was built differently: owned by 200 partners who drive the business, operating one global team that combines marketing and technology 50/50, designed to deliver outcomes faster and more simply. This means that rather than simply keeping up, DEPT® is engineered to help clients get ahead. “We’re the only player in the game that has that balance,” says Dimi, “really pushing on pioneering work – being first and being fast.”
The partnership model does something quite profound for DEPT®’s culture. “It means that every one of our clients and every one of our people has a personal relationship with one of the owners, which makes it much more entrepreneurial. It makes it faster, more personal, more long-standing,” says Dimi.
It also makes the day job all the more meaningful for those building the company’s future. “Because we have those 200 owners who have their own money in the business – they give a shit about it, right? They’re consciously here with their family’s future invested, because they don’t want to be somewhere else that doesn’t represent those values,” he adds.
Growing from 100 to 4,000 staff in just ten years reflects an extraordinary pace of expansion for Dept, and Dimi is glad that the agency’s partner-led culture and clear values have remained steady throughout that growth. “This is the toughest part of building our business,” he says. “With scale comes process and complexity – and generally, process and complexity have a tendency to kill some of the cultural parts that we think are important. So this is the one thing that I’d say we try our best to work on every day. It’s basically pushing back the big beast to make sure that you can retain the cultural values that are important.”
‘Growth Invention’ isn’t a hand-break turn for the company. Instead, Dimi sees it as an opportunity to help his 4,000 colleagues move forward and become more aligned. “It’s much more articulating what we’ve been doing for our clients over the past ten years, and just being much more outspoken,” he says.
At a time when agency holding companies are more in flux than ever, a growing, independent company of this size, with technology at its core as well as creativity, is a compelling offering to brands. “The alternative is this: we have a lot of different capabilities that we’re putting out there as an independent, compared to the holding companies, the consultancies, the system integrators,” says Dimi. “But if you’re looking for speed, agility, innovation – we are the alternative for the market. It means that we can also coexist with many of our friendly competitors within clients.”
In 2015, the landscape was drastically different. “We were the first to really bring together technology and marketing,” says the global CEO. “Accenture Interactive [now Song] didn’t exist back then. The holding companies didn’t have any technology embedded in them. However, now everybody has consolidated and has brought those capabilities into big organisations, which makes it much more important for us to articulate clearly what we do differently and what value we can bring to clients. That’s what the repositioning does.”
To accompany its new positioning, DEPT® is refreshing its brand identity. Anchored by the star, which symbolises moving forward, flexibility, and connection, the new identity places clients at its center, to highlight how DEPT® is uniting marketing and technology to unlock growth.
DEPT®’s growth has been organic, averaging more than 20% year-on-year in its first decade. But the company has expanded its footprint and expertise through a steady stream of acquisitions. A total of 34 agencies have come together under one brand, one P&L – a company not a network, Dimi stresses. “The main thread through all of those acquisitions is: how can we add either new capabilities or geographies that will help our clients grow their business faster? It’s that simple.”
In the beginning, it was about balancing the capability portfolio first in DEPT®’s home market of the Netherlands, then building out that same portfolio abroad, ultimately adding up to 20-plus countries across five continents. “But the core has always been about working for clients, clients we’ve been working with for a long time, new clients who come to us or we win, whatever it is. What are their growth challenges? And what can we add to help them secure that growth?”
Positioning around growth is a claim many businesses promise, to maximise value for the business. But at DEPT®, Dimi sees things differently: “Growth sounds like a really flat thing, but it’s actually very complex and nuanced, because your brand and how you make that emotional connection to your audiences and consumers is just a part of it. Then there’s the media and where you find those consumers. Then there’s the process of building the customer journey. There are all the steps.”
Over 10 years, some client wins have been more impactful for DEPT® than others, particularly brands in categories that have allowed the company to work across different parts of the customer journey – which has been exemplary in key wins like eBay globally or online retailer Bol in the Benelux-region. “How a brand lives from the advertising into the CRM and everything in between,” says Dimi. “Those are ones to be proud of.”
And then there are the massive-scale clients, like Meta. “I can’t even count how many markets we’re working with them in – 50-plus languages and all that jazz,” he says. “Getting those clients in and growing with them to that massive scale is proof to other clients: that these guys are not just some upstart thing, but you can actually trust them with significant footprint, media pressure, complexity, and cultural diversity. Those are monumental in our journey.”
Some projects aren’t even client wins, they were initiated within DEPT®, like Nvidia and the Society of American Deaf Children. “We started to go around asking what kind of brand or tech company might be interesting and which NGO we could work with,” says Dimi. “It’s funny, you’re not pitching against somebody or gaining a client in that traditional sense, but you’re going out there, figuring something out, getting them on the bandwagon, to make something that makes an impact. There are a few of those, which I think garner a lot of pride in our people and in me as well.”
With the right choices, a strong culture, and an understanding that every piece of technology serves DEPT®’s client value, Dimi brims with optimism, despite the industry’s wider upheaval. “This is the best moment to get into our industry, because there are thousands of people who’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years, and you can come in fresh from university, high school, or another job and skill up faster. You can utilise AI and bring so much value,” he says. “There’s something really interesting about this time – in a positive way.”
It's that attitude that has repeatedly helped DEPT® to invent growth for its clients. “We’ve had that growth momentum for the past ten years,” concludes Dimi. “Which means that it’s an underwriting of: we’re doing the right things. We can just do it even more and even more articulately.”
