The marketing world is full of crystal balls (it was ever thus) and peering into his at Campaign’s Media 360 conference was Anatoly Roytman, Accenture Interactive’s big boss outside the US.
Accenture is good at naming things and Roytman (below) reckons the agency world is going to be dominated by “cagencies,” combos of consultancies and agencies like his. “Consultancies that are moving rapidly into what used to be the agency space. And also agencies trying to acquire some business consultancy skills as well as tech.
“Maybe there will be a dozen big entities that will be able to service big clients, but in addition there will be a huge number of small, but very specialist, creative agencies.
“In this day and age, to be creative, you don’t need the infrastructure of big agency holding companies anymore.”
Roytman’s version of the future is not so dissimilar to that offered by adam&eveDDB’s David Golding last year when he said that agencies were dividing into this those that produced “culture” – transformative advertising – and those dealing in collateral, high volume content.
Where Accenture and its consultancy peers differ is offering “the whole customer experience,” tech as well as marketing and other customer-focussed activities. Lots of creative agencies are trying to do this to but, as they’re most inside holding companies, they often get in a muddle with tech and data. Who owns it, the creative agency or the media agency or someone else entirely?
As Accenture continues to claim it has no interest in media it’s not a problem for them and, anyway, their whole approach is founded on tech and its soul mate data. The issue for Roytman and co. is creativity. Can cherry picking the likes of Karmarama, Ireland’s Rothco, Australia’s The Monkeys and design studio Fjord give it the network capabilities that some clients still require?
Roytman is adamant that he doesn’t to be – or acquire – a holding company. But a decent creative network from one of the big holding companies or, maybe, the likes of MDC could help Accenture get where it wants to be quicker.