Two big brands have appointed Accenture. But, where are the agencies?

Just recently, Radisson Hotel Group appointed Accenture Interactive as its global experience agency to increase the digital presence of the company’s brands and hotels and transform the digital experience to improve customer acquisition and retention.

Radisson has worked with Accenture Interactive previously to create a chatbot for the meetings and event planners. This new appointment will see the ‘agency’ apply technology and data for personalized and targeted campaigns across all digital channels while also creating content. The objective of these efforts is to increase traffic i.e. new business for the group.

BMW Group also extended its relationship with Accenture Interactive to support the BMW and MINI brands through the delivery and support of content and features across its digital channels worldwide.

The agency will work alongside BMW’s digital teams to create experience-driven advertising. It will tailor digital content to suit the needs of 120 local markets in addition to managing all advertising including search and social, as well as website support service.

Whose job is it anyway?

Content creation and distribution, search, social, etc. are very much a digital – and now even media and creative – agency’s bread and butter.

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“Brands will need data strategy and the right technology to allow them to analyze data, and that’s where agencies come in,” says Brigitte Majewski, vice-president and research director for Forrester. She adds that a lot of the more traditional agencies don’t rely on data since they’re so focused on creative, and that won’t work anymore.

As Anatoly Roytman, who leads Accenture Interactive in Europe, Africa and Latin America says, “Taking a holistic approach to data, creativity and marketing technologies means we can support Radisson Hotel Group to deliver market-leading digital campaigns.”

So, how real is the threat to agencies?

It depends who you ask.

At a panel a few months back, Paul Banham the then executive creative director of FP7, said, “The best agencies have always worked liked consultants.”

For the first time in 2017, four consultancies cracked Ad Age’s ranking of the 10 largest agency companies in the world. With combined revenue of $13.2 billion, the marketing services units of Accenture, PwC, IBM and Deloitte sit just below WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, Interpublic and Dentsu.

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Yet, the same panel Banham spoke at argued that consultancies lack the creativity and spark of agencies, which plays a huge role in creating ideas and campaigns that move audiences.

As DDB Dubai managing director Lucy Miller asserted, “Some of the most memorable ideas in the world, arguably, didn’t come from spreadsheets and data. When tested, they failed. But they’re memorable and made people cry. The business insights coming from the big four are compelling. The bit that concerns me is the lack of human ideas. And so we lose the bravery and punk rock attitude of marketing and advertising.”