TOKYO: Dentsu Inc. announced that its global business headquarters Dentsu Aegis Network Ltd has reached an agreement to acquire a 100% stake in Chef Smart Marketing Mix, a full-service digital agency in Colombia. Post acquisition Chef will join Isobar and be rebranded “Chef, an Isobar Company.”

Chef was founded in 2010 as a marketing consultant company by four industry experts who set out to establish an agency in Colombia to facilitate a transformation of its clients’ business by further understanding consumers, focusing on the quality of interactions rather than frequency of impressions.

The agency today houses 136 employees at its headquarters in Medellín and an additional 15 at its office in Bogotá. Together, this dedicated team of experts offers solutions in content marketing, digital transformation, e-commerce, branding, and customer and interactive experience. Recognizing the importance of technology in their operations, Chef maintains commercial partnerships with Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and IBM.In 2018, Colombia’s P&M Magazine ranked Chef the 3rd largest digital agency in the Colombian market based on operating revenue.

This addition will solidify the Dentsu Group’s positioning within the creative, technology, and digital domains in the Columbian market and will add scale as well as enhanced capabilities t o the Group’s Latin American operations. The impact of this transaction on Dentsu’s consolidated financial results for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2019 is expected to be minimal.