Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts.Accenture Interactive has grown massively in the 11 years since its founding.
Accenture Interactive has grown massively in the 11 years since its founding.
The agency division of consulting giant, Accenture has annual revenue of $10 billion and is growing 30% annually. It has acquired some 20 companies – including programmatic services company Adaptly and creative agency Droga5 – and today employs 20,000 people across 40 offices.
This week on AdExchanger Talks, senior managing director Glen Hartman discusses how Accenture Interactive builds unified marketing plans that span experience design, programmatic execution, data science, creativity and other disciplines.
“They key difference with Accenture Interactive is that the model was built inherently from the ground up as an integrated, unified model,” he says. “It is one P&L, it is one team, it is one capability across the globe. There’s no internal competition ever. It’s highly incented to collaborate, so everyone gets bonused … on the aggregates of pulling other teams in.”
But wait, don’t Accenture Interactive’s holding company adversaries talk a similar game? The words may be different – Sorrell famously (and failingly) made a big push for “horizontality” during his final two years at WPP – but a rose by any other name …
Hartman acknowledges competitors’ progress on this front but says the firewalls between agencies handcuff them as collaborators.
“I don’t mean to have the hubris to say we’re the only ones who are doing this stuff, but it’s just a little easier for the clients to work with us,” Hartman says. “[The holding companies] don’t do the same capabilities the same in each agency. They’re actually arguing over the best way to get performance out of a marketing campaign from Texas to Cleveland. The client still has to manage that.”
In this episode: The meaning of “experience.” The definition of “managed service.”
