What you need to know:

• After a major structural and tech overhaul, IAG Customer & Marketing Chief Michelle Klein is bidding to move faster in delivering world class customer experience, uniform across every access point.
• It's a hugely ambitious project that Klein thinks requires a single agency partner to deliver end-to-end – i.e. brand, comms, customer experience, digital transformation et al in a single hit. 
• Hence opting for a single partner, Accenture Song, to deliver over a bunch of best of breed specialists.
• Accenture Song boss David Droga suggests that choice is a false construct – he claims it can deliver best of breed across the piste – and aims to use the work for NRMA to prove it globally.
• Klein, Droga, Accenture Song’s creative chief Nick Law and ANZ Lead Mark Green unpack what and where next for NRMA and Song's "lighthouse project" – and the broader industry as AI sets apart the data haves and have nots, and the creative wheat from the chaff.
• There's more nuance – and a hint of competitive jab – in the podcast. Get the full download here.

After a massive structural and tech overhaul to unite customer and marketing functions under CEO Julie Batch, NRMA is now bidding to link everything together digitally and physically in how it reaches, serves and keeps customers across the piste – Michelle Klein is aiming not just for ‘customers for life’, but intergenerational customer loyalty.

For Accenture Song, it’s a chance to show the world it can truly deliver end-to-end, i.e. shape all aspects of brand, customer experience and digital transformation in tandem with IAG's own newly centralised team.

While NRMA is no “guinea pig,” per CEO David Droga, with Song likewise handling pretty much everything marketing and customer for Jaguar Land Rover, it’s “virgin territory” in terms of scope, but “not in terms of can we pull this off”. That said, he's aiming to use its work with NRMA as "proof" to show just what Accenture Song can do – and the business will be pulling in expertise from across the globe to deliver NRMA’s master plan. Both parties will be held to matching ambition with results.

Droga’s confident Song can deliver and rejects any suggestion that there is a trade off between one partner to deliver everything end-to-end versus working with a village of best in class agency and tech partners. Song, he claims, is “both … you don't have to choose, this isn't a compromise.” Plus, he says, fragmentation in delivery makes no logical sense from a consumer perspective.

“Consumers don't separate their relationship with the brand [you won’t often hear them say] ‘I really like the service department’ … they want one whole thing in its entirety. So everything should be given that same sort of consideration and thought process,” he says.

“That's the advantage of being able to stitch it all together end-to-end. End-to-end isn't just about one throat to choke, it's much more about having one voice to speak from, one belief system, one ambition, one level of integrity.”

More Help, faster

Likewise NRMA’s Klein thinks a single partner reflects NRMA’s own mission to collapse silos in pursuit of stronger growth – and get there faster. The ex-Meta global exec is on a mission to embed an Agile methodology and mindset honed during a decade in Silicon Valley in a bid to drive growth and retention under a single overarching metric: “Have we moved the needle on customer experience?” Hence the company first overhauling its own structure – and now engaging a single partner to help turn intent into delivery.

“There's a lot of complexity in delivering a customer experience that feels seamless. Part of the thinking is how do you make the operating model as simple as possible so that the handoffs between – whether it's internal, client-side, external agency-side, platform-side – are as few as possible. I've learned that myself over my career, and I think that's a really helpful way to work,” she says.

By removing friction and “multiple fingers touching different things”, the aim is to “build a faster and more agile approach that will ultimately be looked at by a few sets of eyes versus thousands of eyes”, she adds. “Part of what we're trying to do here is move fast – and part of moving fast is having a few brilliant people around the table to deliver something fantastic for our customers.”

Proof of concept

Droga sees NRMA as a chance to build a global capability case study out of Australia – one that validates Song’s entire strategy.

“We all joined Song to take things to a new level. This is a way to really prove out the decision to do that – and I need proof points,” says Droga. “As much as I want to do this because it's the absolute right thing to do for NRMA and for the market, this [brief] is a way to prove out what we've invested our time in, what we've built up here – the companies we’ve bought, the people we've hired, the models we've designed – and that's why we're drawn to it.”

Droga likewise thinks only a fully integrated delivery partner can deliver what both brands and consumers now seek – and suggests comms holding companies cannot play at the same level. (He claims holdcos are no longer Song’s competitive set: “We don't really have any traditional rivals anymore. We compete against them a little bit, but they're in a different game to us.”)

“Consumer expectations in the marketplace have changed so drastically that you can't segment it anymore. Unless you look at things holistically and change everything with consistency as well, you can't really shape and change things,” says Droga.

“We're the largest tech-powered creative group in the world. All of our practices and all our capabilities are designed around the consumer and the customer. The holding companies, they designed their business model to stalk clients’ media money, so they built a whole business to follow the media dollars. And as that changed, they were left holding the bag.

“We're very fortunate that we've designed our business around going where the customer goes and consumer goes … and to sincerely build things because in essence, we're a tech company,” Droga continues. “So the brief and challenge from the NRMA is second to none and it has rallied all of us.”

Accenture Song Creative Chair Nick Law agrees.

“One of the issues is that media has been separated from technology. So the medium, or the delivering technology in marketing, is media – and it's been separated from creative since the 80s. We have a model where the medium and the creatives are in dialogue in creating something – and you can only innovate if you work at the intersection of a lot of things,” says Law. “If you're siloed – or in Michelle's case, if she's got too many partners that aren't connected – then you don't get that innovation.”

Success metrics

Both brand and agency are working through what success ultimately looks like – though in the shorter-term some initial output will be on show by July via its partnership with Nine for the Paris Olympics. Klein says Nine has similarly thought-through “every channel and every touch point … it’s not just a linear TV buy, it’s fully integrated, end-to-end … and we’re thinking about it strategically in how we do as much as possible”.

Longer-term, Klein has lofty intent – she sees Vegas-based ecom player Zappos and Apple as the “seamless experience” high water marks for NRMA to aim at.

“It’s a big ambition,” she admits, and may ultimately result in people spending more quality time with the brand, but potentially less overall. “If that means being on the website for less time, if you can go in and out quickly, that's a good customer outcome. And so we're working through all of those different scenarios,” says Klein.

“If you think about your own experience, you want it to be seamless, you want to have the same voice speaking to you, whether you're engaging through an app, or whether you're engaging with the person, whether you're on the phone, either in a heightened moment [i.e. an emergency] or whether you're just renewing your policy. So I think as a customer, we want to create that. As a brand we want to make sure that every touch-point can be as seamless as possible. And we'll start in different places and test things and learn as we go.”

Hard metrics of success are still being formulated, given the project’s nascent stage, “but we are going to look at things like trust and loyalty and sentiment and momentum,” says Klein.

Accenture Song ANZ Lead Mark Green says key objectives are around “reinvigorating brand love, reinventing the experience and modernising our relevance with our customers.” He says success metrics will include “brand trust, NPS, sales, conversion, loyalty, retention, brand health and are we appealing to the next generation of customers?”

Klein says that last part is key, given NRMA has built its entire brand platform in recent years on the promise of ‘Help’ when the worst happens – and aims to carry that over well into its second century with customers only just beginning to think about insurance.

“The whole idea of insurance, that higher order protection and safety, is that you want to build loyalty and trust over time so you stick with the company for life – and that passes through generations,” she says. “That's really the promise of Help and what we've been focusing on for the last few years – and will continue to do so.”

AI’s next wave

The NRMA-Accenture Song partnership will also leverage AI – Klein says the insurer is already treading that path. “We have a great use for it getting customers back on the road after a total loss, shortening the claims process from 15 days to five – that’s already live,” she says.

From there, it’s a case of deploying AI where it can deliver “untapped” internal and external efficiencies – everything from consistent communications to pre-populating forms, “basic things that AI can do that’s helpful to our staff and customers – it’s an iterative process.”

Accenture Song’s Mark Green thinks there is opportunity for much deeper AI leverage. “We will look at AI across all of the customer touch-points we're looking at – from marketing around personalisation, to getting to customers in a more efficient and quicker way, from commerce to service to digital products – every component part that we will look at will have an AI opportunity and we're already seeing that with the work we're doing so far.”

Nick Law says generative AI takes that further – beyond “parlour tricks” of “creating just a quicker version of an old thing” via prompts. Likewise he says the levelling capability of generative AI will require true creativity to cut through an incoming tsunami of machine-generated content.

“If you think about how easy it is to create assets, there's going to be a long tail of infinite content. So the ability to get any sort of attention, any sort of use of what you create, is going to depend on creative excellence,” he suggests. “So I think that generative AI is going to be an amazing tool for the best creatives. It will also be a really mediocre tool for the bad creatives.”

David Droga made similar points at South by Southwest Sydney, telling audiences gen AI will “blow up mediocre advertising” and he reiterates that the “messy middle” is already being replaced by generative AI, because “it can do better versions of what they are doing”. It is perhaps naïve, he suggests, to assume that “all creativity is worth saving … But the cream of the crop, the original thinkers, it will enhance what they are doing”.

Droga thinks AI is moving so fast that “we're closer to general intelligence then we think” in terms of machines “being able to imagine and problem solve – and that is where it gets really interesting…”

For now though, he thinks the signal is at risk of getting lost in the noise.

"Like all these new technologies, it sets new horizons where everyone gets so excited about what the technology allows us to do that we put aside our creativity for a bit of awe in what that technology allows. Then when we realise that everybody can do exactly the same thing with that technology, everyone's like, ‘oh, we need to innovate with that ... where's the creativity?’"

Outlook: Money moving

Big brands are “more optimistic than you would think,” is Droga’s response to the macro outlook.

“Obviously, a lot of clients and brands are in value mode, looking for value in opportunities … But it's what they're doing with that value that they're saving and how they're parlaying that back into innovation is really interesting – there’s a sort of loop there.”

He steals an Ayrton Senna quote: “’You can only overtake one person at a time per lap in dry weather, but when it's when it's raining, you can overtake six or seven’. A lot of brands are having that sort of mentality of how can I use this current headwinds and nervousness [to overtake competitors]. But there's no question those that had their data and digital core ready were are able to jump into this sort of AI revolution quickly,” he says, whereas the current hype is “exposing a lot of people who aren't ready for it because they just don't have the data.”

Droga suggests the headwinds may be more structural for some parts of the marketing supply chain.

“There's no question on the marketing-brand advertising side, you definitely see they are feeling the pinch there. It's somewhat shrinking – people are competing for less and clients are demanding more,” he says. “But their overarching expenditure, their investment, hasn't changed – it's just moving much more into extending the service and commerce and digital products … and we go where the customer goes.”