Merkle, a leading technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company and part of dentsu, has promoted Niyi Duro-Emanuel to the newly created role of practice lead of the UK Strategy team to drive client progress and transformation.

In this new role, Duro-Emanuel is responsible for leading Merkle’s team of 40 strategists in the UK, providing strategic consultancy to clients across Merkle’s customer experience management and transformation offering.

Duro-Emanuel joined Merkle via the Periscopix acquisition in 2015, now known as Merkle’s performance media practice area, and has been part of the business for over 11 years. Duro-Emanuel initially joined Periscopix in the PPC team, helping to scale the practice to one of the largest and most highly regarded in the UK. Prior to joining the Solutions team 18 months ago, he led the client services team across Merkle’s Media and CX practice areas. He has also held a number of senior client leadership roles, spearheading the development of Merkle’s approach across large integrated clients within media and analytics.

Niyi Duro-Emanuel, practice lead, UK Strategy, Merkle said: “It’s an exciting time to be leading the UK Strategy team at Merkle. The team and I are focussed on developing an outcomes first proposition for clients, to transform customer experience capabilities through adopting technology to truly achieve desired business outcomes. I’m thrilled to be leading such a talented team and helping our clients deliver a total customer experience across every interaction they have with the brand.”

The UK strategy team was previously led by Richard Lees in a dual role which also spanned the EMEA region. Lees was appointed chief strategy officer for Merkle and dentsu’s CXM Service Line across EMEA in December 2020 and was previously EVP Solutions EMEA. Lees and Duro-Emanuel will continue to collaborate on the adoption, alignment and evolution of the EMEA-wide proposition. The creation of Duro-Emanuel’s UK role allows Lees to focus on an EMEA set of operating methods, bringing together a number of Merkle’s key strategic capabilities to drive value-based outcomes for its clients, and deliver on Merkle’s CXM expertise across the region.

Richard Lees, chief strategy officer EMEA, Merkle, said: “The shift of focussing on business outcomes facilitates investment in technology and other capabilities and sets the foundations for businesses at the start of the customer transformation journey. It supports businesses to not only make technology work, but to focus on the outcomes from those investments, making them incrementally better and bigger over time. It’s an ambitious team with experienced and multi-skilled staff and with Niyi leading the focus for the UK, we will achieve great success together”.

Anne Stagg, CEO - CXM at dentsu UK & Ireland, and UK CEO, Merkle, added: “This is an incredibly exciting appointment for the UK business. Niyi’s experience in client leadership and in his most recent role, providing strategic consultancy to help clients navigate the customer experience transformation journey makes him the perfect candidate to lead our first class team of strategists. “

Lees has been instrumental in helping Merkle clients develop integrated solutions to meet a wide range of customer experience needs, across the full spectrum of Merkle’s capabilities and expertise. He first joined Merkle in 2015 as part of the acquisition of DBG, where he was co-founder and CEO. He is adept at helping brands identify the true drivers of business value and leveraging connected data, transformative insights and integrated technology to deliver targeted, personalised and multi-channel experiences.