What you need to know: 

• Deloitte Digital’s Global CEO Sam Roddick says ever since Apple's smart phone and app store revolutionised the way people interacted with technology, his firm has eyed engineering, design and creativity as an ultimate goal for value creation. 
• The firm’s traditional turf in technology implementation and business restructuring for growth is “cold, hard and analytical”, Roddick cedes. But he wants to institutionalise creativity and creative thinking inside the firm and apply it to client transformation programs by blending it with its harder analytical and process credentials. 
• Creativity and emotion underpin the central thesis of behavioural science and the Nobel Prize winning work in economics by Daniel Kahneman and others, which posit people are less rational and stable in decision making than conventional economics assumes. Creative agency stalwarts like Ogilvy UK Chair Rory Sutherland often lament that "the myth of the rational decision-maker has become ludicrously over prevalent and is stymying business growth and innovation".           
• “We see creativity as a multiplier to the value that you create through other techniques,” says Roddick.
• But the biggest challenge is “changing the perception of our colleagues across the broader organisation in the world's biggest professional services firm that has taken an analytical approach to how they serve clients for 150 years-plus”.
• Part of Deloitte Digital’s grander plan to embed creative thinking into the firm – and for its client digital business programs – is the appointment of former Australian CEO of advertising network Clemenger BBDO, Nick Garrett, as Worldwide Lead for the firm’s Marketing and Commerce practice. 
• “I saw one of the most successful creatives in the world, from my point of view, who wanted to join our business to do what he had done with BBDO – applying creativity to more than just communications ... to create more value … in a bigger organisation where the canvas would be so much greater,” says Roddick. 
• More broadly, billions are being spent globally by companies on digital transformation programs but Roddick says the “majority” still fail.
• Deloitte Digital has just completed analysis – using machine learning language models – of the filings from Fortune 500 companies for the past decade. The key findings include a circa $3 trillion, or 5 per cent, “swing” up or down in market capitalisation for US companies that are either articulating well – or poorly – to investors on three digital transformation “notes”, as Roddick calls them: What the company says about its direction; how it says it will execute and; what is publicly disclosed that explains the operational changes being made to “capture the opportunity”. 
• “The total swing for the world economy between approaching digital transformation in the right way versus the wrong way, is a staggeringly big figure,” says Roddick.
• Meanwhile, Deloitte Digital's latest benchmarking of CMOs globally puts Australia way behind global peers on personalisation. There’s an even greater gap around developing, acquiring and retaining talent – we're 50 per cent down on the US and UK on this dimension. Garrett says marketers "cant even fill their bench", let alone the A-team.
• Listen to the Mi3 podcast with Sam Roddick and Nick Garrett here for Deloitte Digital's plans to build Apple-like creativity, design and engineering into its culture, analysis of Fortune 500 success and failures in digital transformation and the latest benchmarks from the 2023 Global Marketing Trends Report.       

Feel the power

By his own admission Sam Roddick has sold-in some eye-popping enterprise restructuring deals in his career but never has he garnered the spontaneous emotional responses from executive leadership when a business pitch combines creativity, culture and an idea that can turn a business.

Creative types can “make a client cry”, but as Roddick argues, those creatives “can’t make their ideas real. They don’t have the agency to do that”. And by agency he means the credentials and capability for end-to-end business case development and market execution.  

Which is why Roddick cites the recent pitch to the CEO of a global CPG company to build a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business as a benchmark for Deloitte Digital’s future go-to market approach – combining the market analysis, business modelling and tech deployment it’s renowned for with what he calls a “value multiplier”: creativity, creative thinking and customer design smarts.

The DTC brief Deloitte Digital pitched recently was “led largely” by the strategy and M&A team but in this instance, the strategy partner leading the project had spent time working on Deloitte’s expanding creative agenda and with the creative teams who were brought in to the project.     

“Of course it had market sizing, and all the things you’d expect form a corporate strategy,” says Roddick. “There was the analysis, the numbers, but our team looked quite carefully in where we used the creatives to look at culture in the category, how to enhance the culture and they looked at how to create brand and meaning for customers.

"When we took the answer back to the CEO, we blended all of that together and for me, what was interesting was actually that the individual [CEO] has a data and analytical background – more of a numbers person than an emotions person … and the thing that resonated most strongly with them was the culture and the creative side of the concept. That's what immediately captured their attention," says Roddick. "They woke up to the promise of something.”

But after the euphoria of the creative approach had settled, the immediate question from the client was “how viable is this?” Roddick says his team neutralised those concerns with the strategic thinking, market assessment and business case analysis.

“So you're putting the two things together,” he says. “You're putting the creation of a business model that can serve a need, that can produce a product, that can distribute a product to an audience, including the last mile of distribution. So you've got all the financials. But what's going to make people come to that product? What's going to make people want to buy it? You're also packaging that side of things, and you're putting it in there as well. So you're offering the complete picture. And we are right now in the process in one of their markets – a big, fast growing market – launching that new direct-to-consumer business with them. And it is all aspects of it.”

Hard, cold analytics

Roddick acknowledges putting the creative stuff closer to the core of Deloitte Digital is new territory for the firm, even though it has acquired or built design studios and has offered digital creative services for some years. The difference today is that he wants creative thinking and creative capabilities blended with the analytical, business and tech smarts upfront in large digital business overhauls.  

This creative bent at Deloitte Digital can be blamed on Apple, its breakthrough moment with the smart phone and App Store. “We said we’ve got to have a part of that. We wanted to launch a business that gets after that,” says Roddick. “[Apple] is a great tech organisation, but how have they created the most valuable company in the world? It is through the application of design; the application of creativity alongside engineering.”

Roddick hails the smartphone as genuine innovation but it was the arrival of the App Store which up-ended conventional business thinking. “That’s what really exploded,” he says. “What you saw was a new way in which people were interacting with an organisation where design and creativity were an essential ingredient. I don’t see ourselves as an infrastructure organisation but – I will use your words – we were an infrastructure organisation. We did technology implementation; we provided clients with advice around how to restructure their business and how to drive growth. But that was cold, hard and analytical. It was technology and it lacked the emotional connection that had burst onto the scene with the iPhone and the app ecosystem that came behind it.”

Tech and creative a hard ask

But 15 years on from Roddick’s App Store romance he admits bluntly: “It turns out that it’s pretty hard institutionally to blend creativity, technology, advisory and strategy.”

Enter Nick Garrett, who joined Deloitte Digital’s Australian unit, initially as a Creative Partner with award-winning ad agency creatives, Adrian Mills and Matt Lawson, who were poached by the firm six years ago from the Melbourne unit of global ad network McCann.

A year after joining, Garrett – who helmed Clemenger BBDO in Australia for more than a decade under various management when it was regarded globally as a creative hot shop – was tapped to lead Deloitte Digital’s commerce and marketing practice. Garrett had long been frustrated with the narrow remit of a creative advertising agency and had been agitating for the business to broaden, but faced internal resistance.

In perhaps a twist of irony, Roddick, his new boss, is facing a similar challenge in reverse; an impressive one-off case study for building an end-to-end DTC commerce unit replete with snappy creative and culture alignment is fine, but how does Deloitte Digital move past a one-off to embed creativity within its own organisation?

“The thing that is most difficult is changing the perception of our colleagues across the broader organisation – in the world’s biggest professional services firm that has taken an analytical approach to how they serve clients for 150 years,” Roddick concedes. “That is challenging.”

It’s precisely what his predecessor Andy Main argued after leaving the firm to become global CEO at one of WPP’s ad agency networks, Ogilvy. “It is much harder to scale creativity than it is to scale technology,” said Main after taking the gig. “I can acquire a lot of technology to accompany an already scaled creative business.” Main left Ogilvy last year after a two year stint. 

Coalition of the willing

How Roddick and Garrett are traversing a path few have successfully hiked is in first identifying those who are “having the growth conversations and they’re a much smaller subset,” says Roddick. Then it’s connecting a coalition of the willing with clients “where the environment is right to take this conversation and … combining the right creative capability with the right strategic capability”.

Garrett says he’s worked on six major projects in the past 18 months where, by the end, it is hard to identify the core Deloitte Digital team – business operations, the “human capital team”,  brand and creative execs or the “more tech orientated digital team. "Collaboration only happens when you're curious. So if people are curious and you can see that it can be a glue or a catalyst for a project you're working on, my experience has been 99.9 per cent positive," per Garrett.

"If creativity is the input of science, engineering, design and art – they're arbitrary words – then it's something we can all share. I think the art of it is creating common language, showing that you respect, understand, and can have a dialogue with really senior leaders in all those areas and show how the idea – and I don't want to say creativity – the idea can actually be the solution or part of the solution to something really big that they're solving," says Garrett. "All of this is theory until you do it.”

Garrett acknowledges consulting firms can be “quite good” at identifying a problem but “maybe not as brilliant” on what the solution could be.

“That solution could be a cultural transformation. It could be a new product design, it could be an adjacency business, it could be new brands launching. It could be any one of those things. But it's that creative and conceptual leap between a problem and a solution – and that solution being able to be genuinely viable from a commercial perspective, truly inspirational from a customer perspective and something that can lead a business into growth through innovation.”

Fortune 500 fortunes

But enough of creative, creativity, ideas and culture. The brutal truth remains that for all the billions spent globally on digital transformation programs – with consultants often at the heart of them – Roddick says “more than half” fail. 

Deloitte Digital released a major piece of analysis this this week using AI to unpack the filings from Fortune 500 companies for the past decade. It suggests a circa $3 trillion, or 5 per cent, “swing” exists in market capitalisation for US companies that either articulate well or poorly to investors on three strategic themes, or “notes”, as Roddick calls them. For Fortune 500 companies that articulate well – and it is simply articulation – there is a collective $1.3 trillion gain in US company valuations; those that don’t get to partake in a $1.5 trillion decline. So what is this elixir? Roddick says it’s what the company says about its direction; how it says it will execute and what it publicly discloses about the operational changes to “capture the opportunity”. 

“The total swing for the world economy by approaching digital transformation in the right way versus the wrong way is a staggeringly big figure,” he says. 

Finally, Garrett is armed with his own Deloitte Digital data from the just released Global Marketing Trends report for 2023 based on research from circa 1,000 interviews with CMOs around the world. 

Moving into volatile economic conditions, the key themes this year are that CMO priorities globally are accelerating the move to new digital technologies and platforms, expanding into new markets and segments and implementing systems to create greater customer personalisation.

Garrett says there’s an “extraordinary difference” between the UK, US and Australia – locally CMOs are 14 percentage points behind their international peers on personalisation. There’s an even greater gap around developing, acquiring and retaining talent – Australia is 50 per cent down on the US and UK on this dimension.

“There isn’t a client I’m talking to that can fill their bench with the right people,” he says of the Australian market. “It's not just tier one people – it’s just kind of fill the bench. So if we’re not looking at developing and acquiring that talent, and it’s a low priority and score in this market where we’re losing people by the droves, that does suggest a problem.”  

And the final kicker for Australian CMOs is that they are also lagging considerably compared to their US and UK peers on whether the marketing function is seen as a catalyst for creativity and output. “Our scores are nearly half the UK and US. It’s probably a reflection of their confidence and whether creativity hasn’t yet matured enough to be a business conversation.”

Given Deloitte Digital’s intent to hug creative thinking and ideas as a value multiplier for digital enterprise transformation, it appears to suggest blue chips in Australia might need an enlightened consulting firm…

Move fast, launch things

Roddick’s final observations on the year ahead is instructive, based on the corporate demand he’s seeing for the types of services from his firm – less back office process and efficiency investments, more on customers and market innovation.

“Clients need to deliver results quickly, they need to deliver growth so they are demanding that our services are much more focused on delivering quicker, immediate outcomes. The data shows that there is likely to be an increased spend on front office technology to enable growth and transactions. Making the business run better has taken a bit of a back seat. Making sure you're out in the market ... that's where we see demand, that's where we are focusing our efforts, that plays well to us," says Roddick. "Whilst I'm not super upbeat about where we stand economically as a global economy, or the UK economy for that matter, I'm pretty upbeat about where we as an organisation stand.”