Dentsu recruits Jason Jarrett as head of operations for ANZ

Dentsu has reunited another member of Accenture Song’s Asia Pacific founders with the recruitment of Jason Jarrett as its new head of operations for Australia and New Zealand.

Jason Jarrett has departed professional services giant Accenture to head up operations for dentsu’s Australia and New Zealand business, having been at the firm since the very beginnings of what is now Accenture Song.

Former Accenture Interactive Asia Pacific managing director Patricio De Matteis was appointed as dentu’s A/NZ chief executive toward the end of last year.

Kicking off his career at boutique accounting and advisory firm Weston, Woodley & Robertson in 1995, Jarrett later joined Sydney-based software development start-up Memetrics, which was then sold to Accenture Marketing Sciences, a small, newly-established analytics arm inside Accenture led by chief strategy officer and former McKinsey & Company partner Tim Breene.

Accenture Interactive was launched the following year, with the unit to Accenture Song in 2022.

While regional director of operations in the early days at what has since become a $18 billion global business, Jarrett was tasked with leading the development and implementation of a consolidated growth strategy across the Asia Pacific region, including further abroad in Greater China, Japan and Southeast Asia, as well as spearheading the division’s aggressive M&A agenda, with Reactive Media and The Monkeys among the locally-closed deals.

“These times invoke my fondest memories working at Accenture under the helm of our charismatic and driven leader Patricio De Matteis, from the phenomenal double-digital growth we delivered over consecutive years to the multiple company’s we successfully acquired and integrated across multiple geographies in the APAC region,” Jarrett wrote in a fond farewell post to LinkedIn upon departing Accenture.

Having served as Accenture’s strategy & consulting practice director of operations for the past two years, Jarrett will now work alongside De Matteis once again, after the latter arrived at dentsu twelve months ago via chief digital leadership stints at Cognizant and PwC. De Matteis has also since brought in other former colleagues, including Gabriel Tamborini to lead a newly-established design and product lab for Dentsu Creative.

Jarrett takes up his new position at a pivotal time for dentsu at the global level, with the firm recently completing its half-a-billion-dollar acquisition of UK agency Tag in an effort to boost its digital transformation business, adding a further 2,800 professionals including in Australia.

The marketing and advertising giant has also undergone a global management restructuring, with Singapore-based Rob Gilby to continue as APAC CEO.

“The enhanced global management structure to support our new ‘One Dentsu’ operating model will accelerate Dentsu’s growth as a people-centred transformation company which shapes society,” stated Dentsu president Hiroshi Igarashi. “It will enable us to drive deeper levels of organisational governance, as well as generate value for clients and the world we live in by maximising the unrivalled expertise of our 72,000 people worldwide.”