What you need to know:

• Deloitte Digital Australian boss Esan Tabrizi says the Australian business business is now 1,400 strong and encompasses every challenge a CMO, CDO and CEO has relating to customer acquisition, experience and retention across an entire business.
• Tabrizi, a one-time software engineer and later exec at digital agencies like Hothouse and WPP-owned Bullseye, was frustrated with the narrow scope of work inside digital shops - often driven by clients, which led him to join then Deloitte Online in 2010 to go deeper and broader on business and customer transformation.
• Marketers spent too much time over the past decade on advertising, brand and creativity, Tabrizi says, and not enough on the tech and data side.
• The next generation of successful CMOs are tech savvy and world-weary on tech stacks.
• The Red versus Blue (Adobe v Salesforce) tech battle should move on: "In my humble experience, it's rarely entirely blue stack versus red stack. It's usually a mix and match,” says Tabrizi.
• Governments are leading the private sector in customer experience – they don’t see CX as a way to sell more products but a way to help people, Tabrizi says.
• Despite some criticism from ex-consulting execs retuning to the agency sector lamenting "professional services isn't all it's cracked up to be", Deloitte Digital is turning to creativity and creative thinking as its next competitive edge. 
• Increasingly clients no longer want a 100-page strategy deck, he says, but want to tie Deloitte Digital to outcomes and results – and that includes payment terms linked to pre-agreed business outcomes and KPIs.
• Get all the good oil in full nuance from Mi3's podcast with Esan Tabrizi here.   

Creative solution

Advertising and slick visual communications is not the end game for Deloitte Digital despite the firm doing plenty of it today and even topping the creative rankings in Campaign Brief's The Work, ahead of global and local ad networks and consulting rivals. Creativity and creative thinking is Deloitte Digital's next big mantra after more than a decade delivering more left brain-skewed customer and tech transformation programs. The plan is to take creativity beyond Deloitte Digital to the broader Deloitte business and its client programs. More on that shortly but Tabrizi says while many marketing teams missed the boat on tech and customer for a decade, they're now catching up and the next generation of gun CMOs, he says, are more tech savvy and won’t be bamboozled by the tech stack wars - he calls it Red versus Blue in a subtle nod to the Adobe-Saleforce tech stack battle. 

More than 10 per cent of the 12,700-strong Australian arm of the Deloitte juggernaut is focussed on digital transformation, customer strategy, growth, experience, product and – increasingly – creativity and advertising via its Deloitte Digital arm.

The unit inside Deloitte was once the “weirdos in the corner” who wore jeans and T-shirts, per its lead Esan Tabrizi. It’s now a 1,400-strong powerhouse that, earlier this year, topped Campaign Brief’s The Work 2022 list as Agency of the Year, ahead of the second-ranked VMLY&R, Accenture Song-owned The Monkeys in third and Dentsu Creative in fourth. Two consulting firms in the top four Australian creative slots is telling.  

Indeed, Deloitte Digital wants to be everywhere except in media buying and planning, where the game remains too opaque for its liking. But it is leveraging the rest of the Deloitte group to be “part agency, part consultancy, part tech systems integrator” and earlier this year acquired martech and customer experience (CX) indies Venntifact, Blended Digital and New Republique to claim leadership status across those sectors.

“Wherever CMOs, Chief Digital Officers, CEOs, have got any sort of challenges when it comes to their customers,” Tabrizi says, “that's what Deloitte Digital solves at a headline level.”

Tabrizi, a former software engineer, started in digital agencies but found it frustrating being pigeonholed into the digital niche. He wanted to sit at the table with the execs and find solutions to big issues.  “In my experience, brands still look at digital agencies, marketing agencies, as effective organisations to solve a very niche problem,” he says.

“But when an exec is after solving a much bigger transformation problem… that capability typically doesn't exist in your niche digital agency.”

Marketers missed the boat on digital, Tabrizi says, and instead focused on advertising, brand and creative – at the expense of customer experience and the tech systems to deliver it and product, product strategy and data. The next wave of successful CMOs, he reckons, won’t make the same mistake. But there are challenges to choosing the right tech stack, and the “religious wars” of choosing one provider aren’t helping. From his vantage point across Deloitte Digital’s clients, Tabrizi says government bodies are leading the private sector on customer experience and personalisation. He also has some thoughts on how he thinks his team’s approach will go versus the traditional agencies and holding groups.

Embracing creativity, tied to outcomes

It has been a slowish build for Deloitte Digital over the past 12 years into the creative area. Initially focused heavily on customer experience, personalisation and the then fledgling areas of martech and CRM, it wasn’t until 2015 or so that Deloitte started hiring creatives. Former McCann Melbourne MD Adrian Mills and Executive Creative Director Matt Lawson of world-beating "Dumb Ways to die" fame, were the first big-name hires out of adland for the firm. Former Clemenger-BBDO CEO Nick Garrett was another hig-profile scalp last year.      

“We didn’t hire them because we want them to do advertising. We've hired them because they're very capable creatives. They do ads for our clients when our clients need them,” Tabrizi says.

“But I want to stress that's not probably the end game for us. The end game is to make sure that creativity infuses all of Deloitte.” Deloitte's 2017 work with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, which calculated the value of the Reef as $56 billion, was an early "proud moment" where the creative team worked alongside Deloitte Access Economics. Even the Deloitte hardliners, says Tabrizi, are warming to creative thinking or unconventional approaches to business challenges.

“Very traditional Deloitte partners are now looking at this across the region and going, 'wow, we can see this difference. We can see the impact that it has,' says Tabrizi. "Even measured at pure business sales and win rates, these [creative] guys make a material difference when they are part of a big pitch that we're trying to solve problems for in a different way for our clients. So the business actually started to understand that this is not just about colouring in the boxes. This is actually going to have business value and business impact if we bring these guys at the right time, early in the process, to help change the way we think about shaping an answer for a client."

Tabrizi points back to Deloitte Digital topping Campaign Brief's creative rankings as evidence for a broader lense on creativity. " 

"The reason Deloitte Digital is now ranked first, if you look at that list of case studies that Campaign Brief was reviewing, a good portion of those are non-advertising, non-marketing case studies," says Tabrizi. "There is plenty in there that is about how we're solving bigger problems for our clients. But creativity, as part of that, creativity infused in that has really shaped or differentiated the way we've approached problems. And that's what really makes me proud, because it's not just because we're doing a few ads on the side - again, these guys do some brilliant ads - but it's not just that. It's about the fact that we've got a world class creative team really changing the way we solve problems."

Beyond the creative mission, Tabrizi acknowledges big professional services firms have had a reputational challenge for some time as “cut and run” merchants - they tend to deliver complex solutions in a high-end document then leaving the business to it. That’s changing, Tabrizi says, and more executives are tying Deloitte Digital to the outcomes, a development he welcomes.

“I don't think the criticism is unfair,” he says. But “astute execs” are no longer after 100-page strategy decks but results.

Those conversations can end in tying Tabrizi’s team to hard numbers – lifts in NPS (net promoter scores), or growth figures. With the backing of the rest of Deloitte, this is something he says smaller agencies can’t deliver.

“The simple model is that clients might ask us to sign up for velocity of delivery, or up-time, and we get paid on outcomes like that. And those are the really simple outcomes,” he says.

“But then the other end of that extreme is when our clients ask us to sign up to, for example, growth targets in acquiring new customers for their brand. Or NPS ratings around how customers are perceiving and how happy they are with the brand and uplifts on NPS. Those are very serious targets and you would never be able to do that as a niche digital agency that's got only control of five per cent of the outcome.”

Marketers missed the boat on tech, next wave won’t

In the early days of Tabrizi’s time at Deloitte, then called Deloitte Online circa 2010, marketers spent too much time focusing on brand, advertising and creative. “Maybe, to an extent, that exists today,” he says – as a general observation, without naming names. The shortcomings of the CMO gave rise to the Chief Digital and Chief Transformation Officer, areas that should, by rights, have fallen under the marketing remit.

“If you look at the CMO remit as an end-to-end issue, that is all centred around the customer and how we solve for the customer. Technology and data would have to play a key role in it,” he says.

“And I would argue maybe 10 or 12 years ago, CMOs, at least in Australia, CMOs were giving up ground on technology and data and just focusing on creativity, advertising, communications. And even the rise of this chief digital officer and chief transformation officer, and in some organisations, that still is a key part of the organisation - I'm not dismissing it, but my personal theory is that the rise of the chief digital officer role was as a result of that gap that was created where CMO weren't filling the technology gap. It needed someone that had the creativity, the marketing understanding of customer that's inherent in the CMO, but it also needed someone who understood tech stacks and how to effectively use data. And that created the sort of rise of CDOs.”

It has taken more than a decade, but marketers are starting to develop some serious digital nous. The next wave of top marketers will look at all of these pieces – customer acquisition, personalisation, customer experience, mass reach – and see a full picture.

“We strongly believe that the next generation of incredibly successful CMOs are going to be very tech savvy and really get the space well,” Tabrizi says. “Not expecting every CMO to be a software engineer, but having the right team around them and making sure that they can solve these problems holistically is really what is going to move the dial for those brands.” Marketers are starting to view brand as more than “colours and fonts”, but as a business strategy, and looking at how data, customer experience and journeys can all reflect that brand.

‘The tech is the easy part’

Being across the many tech providers is challenging – Tabrizi says even Deloitte’s broad ranks aren’t experts in them all. They leverage the global team to pick the winners.

“It would be remiss of me to sit here and say we are an expert in implementing every single CRM (customer relationship management) that exists out there. We're not. We pick our battles. We pick the ones that we are backing, if I can call it that, and we go hard after it,” he says.

“There are two different questions you need to answer. One question is what technology should I use? And the other one is how do I implement it and get the most value out of the technology?”

Picking the right technology is an enormous investment, he adds. But chief marketers and chief information officers have been “caught up in the religious wars of ‘blue is better than red’”. And it’s impacting the quality of what they deliver the business.

“In my humble experience, it's rarely entirely blue stack versus red stack. It's usually a mix and match,” Tabrizi says.

“The technology is almost the easy part of the solution. The technology is mature enough when it's sold, typically, that you could say, ‘tick, I've got the right technology to solve this’. However, these problems are well beyond just the technology.”

Having accurate and clean data, and the skills that can then use the tech itself, is the second – and likely more challenging – part of the puzzle.

“A lot of times when I typically speak with CMOs and CIOs, they say 'Esan, we have bought all the shiny toys possible. We've got everything here, but we're not getting value out of it'. And when you dig under the hood of that, it's not necessarily the tech is failing them,” Tabrizi says.

“It's the maturity within the organisation to maximise the tech, to really deliver the customer experience required for the customer – that's where it has fallen over. And yes, maybe at the point of sale, the account executive has sold them the dream of the technology without necessarily really talking about how tough of a journey they've got ahead of them.” 

Government leading business on CX

Late last year, Brent Smart, the former IAG CMO turned Telstra marketing chief, said digital transformation that reduces friction is effectively leading to “vanilla” customer experiences. Everyone is starting to look the same, in other words. Smart questioned whether deliberately adding friction – as he was doing with new youth insurance brand Rollin’ – could make the experience distinctive and appealing.

“What happens with a lot of CX and UX is they've become so focused on creating utility and on taking out the customer pain points and making it all very clean that I worry it all sort of becomes the same, it’s very generic,” Smart said.

Tabrizi encounters the same problem but from a different side. Sure, creativity is part of the answer to bland, generic customer experiences, but the wider issue is that the industry has got personalisation wrong.

“The broader challenge is that the last few years, the focus on data and marketing and personalisation has just been around, ‘how do I upsell? How do I use your data to sell you more stuff?’ Under the guise of customer experience,” Tabrizi says.

“When you look at it with that lens, then you would not really be focusing on customer experience.”

Rather, the thought process – and this is where creativity can play an important part – should be around how data can improve the customer experience, not sell an additional product. And government entities are at the forefront of this.

“We are actually, interesting enough, having more of these conversations with our public sector clients than anywhere else. It's fascinating to see how much government is really leaning in on this. Because in their mind, this is not about upsell, this is about better servicing citizens,” he says. “So that conversation is really coming to the forefront there. And I think a lot of brands have got a lot to learn from government now. It's actually flipping a bit.”

CX in a vacuum

Too many organisations are designing customer experiences in a “vacuum” before rolling them out, rather than constantly tinkering and building. That’s one of the reasons Deloitte acquired CX and martech indies earlier this year.

“If you look at big digital brands, if you look at Google, for example, they constantly experiment on improving the experience and they always experiment on a subset of their users. They roll it out even down to the minutiae of what font and what colour, and the impacts of that, is constantly tested and experimented on,” Tabrizi says.
“Increasingly we've seen clients be a lot more astute around, 'let's not spend millions of dollars designing this in a back room and with focus groups. Let's get something out tested and refine it and refine it'. And that's where the magic of customer experience is going to really come to the forefront.”

Holdco, agency strategy not wrong, but too short

How does Tabrizi, who cut his teeth in digital agencies HotHouse and Bullseye, view his competitive set – especially in the agency and holding company sector?

“While I strongly believe in our strategy, and I feel that our strategy is paying off as demonstrated through awards and recognition… I don't necessarily feel the strategies of my competitors are wrong,” he says.

“However, I'm increasingly seeing clients coming to us wanting to do bigger things, but because of the risk inherent in those bigger things, they want us to be part of that journey with them. They want us to really own an outcome end to end. They don't want someone to tell them ‘this is a strategy’, or ‘this is the economic modelling’ and then walk away…