[Interview] Mark van den Beij, Growth Director, DEPT

Marketing Report is in Copenhagen at DEPT. We speak with Growth Director Mark van den Beij. He has been with DEPT for seven years. He started at the Amsterdam office and moved to Denmark a year ago

Marketing Report has been in  Copenhagen at DEPT. We speak with Growth Director Mark van den Beij. He has been with DEPT for seven years. He started at the Amsterdam office and moved to Denmark a year ago.

The Copenhagen office has between 120 and 150 employees, with a smaller office in Aarhus. “From here, we are essentially taking on the Nordics. The focus is mainly on Denmark. We also work with clients in Norway and Sweden.”

Design, B2B and local heroes

The client portfolio ranges from Danish lifestyle brands to companies that few people outside their own category have heard of. “It’s an interesting mix. We have a number of clients that are firmly rooted in the Danish design segment — furniture and lifestyle. We work with B2B companies, major global names, and also a few local players in telecom and energy.”

That mix has a history. DEPT entered Copenhagen in 2018 through the acquisition of online marketing agency QuantAds, and in 2020 added strategic design agency Sorthvid, which brought clients including Pandora, Royal Copenhagen and Magasin. In 2021, both were folded into the DEPT brand. The office’s dual profile is still evident.

A healthy country

“Overall, it’s a very stable economy. Denmark is a very healthy country. There are many large global organisations here. One that people are probably familiar with is Novo Nordisk. And Lego, to name a couple.”

The scale is significant. Last week, Novo Nordisk awarded its US media mandate to Omnicom, an assignment estimated to be worth more than half a billion dollars a year. For DEPT, the commercially interesting opportunity lies in the balance between those kinds of brands and the layer below them. “Local heroes, as we call them. Larger Danish or Nordic clients.”

Room to grow

Growth is both the job title and the mandate. “The ambitions are always high. There is a lot of attention on the region. We see a lot of potential specifically in Denmark, but also in the broader region.”

Compared with the rest of the group, the Nordics are a small outpost. DEPT has more than 4,000 specialists worldwide across around 30 offices and is majority-owned by The Carlyle Group. “If you compare our presence here with, for example, the Netherlands or the UK, we are relatively small. But if you look at the size of the market, we see plenty of opportunities to grow.”

Strong in experience

The Copenhagen office is known for user experience and design, a reputation it inherited from Sorthvid. “There’s a super-strong, experienced team here. That team works on local clients as well as international ones.” The same applies to the creative and media teams.

No meeting without AI

What clients come to DEPT for has increasingly converged across markets. “There’s probably no conversation, no meeting, without AI coming up. And then there are the underlying systems that feed it — the tech stack, martech and data. Experience is still a major pillar.”

DEPT put its own response on the table in June. At Cannes Lions, the agency launched Deptify, an agentic orchestration layer that connects the tools and data a client already has rather than replacing them. It is explicitly positioned against the closed systems of the holding companies: WPP Open, Publicis CoreAI and Omnicom Omni. Last October, DEPT repositioned itself as “the growth invention company.”

Future Club is coming

“Promising, I would say. There are a lot of activities here to raise our visibility in the market and make sure DEPT has a strong presence. We have the Future Club, as we do in other markets. There are also a few other initiatives underway. So we are really looking forward to Q3 and Q4 here.”

Future Club is the private network for senior marketing and technology leaders that DEPT launched in February together with The Marketing Society, Adobe and Shopify. The network organises more than 50 events a year in New York, London, Berlin and Amsterdam. Copenhagen is not yet on that list.

www.deptagency.com

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