What you need to know:

• Accenture ANZ lead Mark Green says deal for martech consultancy The Lumery was because demand for end-to-end brand-tech-data-CX is soaring, not because of capability gaps. “The team was stretched”.
• He bats back suggestions from some critics who say no agency group or consulting firm is genuinely delivering end-to-end for brands.
• Green and The Lumery co-founder Raj Kumar see the rise of customer chiefs absorbing CMO, CIO and CTO remits at the big end of town as symptomatic of the market need to join all dots. Hence service providers must likewise de-silo.
• Kumar sees accelerating consolidation of tech and services with blue chips asking pointier questions on why significant investments and customer initiatives are seemingly under-delivering.
• Asked if Accenture Song sees media buying as a gap in its end-to-end capability, Green doesn’t rule out an acquisition.

New model army

Accenture ANZ chief Mark Green said he pushed through the acquisition of martech outfit the Lumery because the firm “needed a bigger army” such is the volume of end-to-end work coming at marketing services firm.

Green and Lumery co-founder & CEO Raj Kumar predict more assignments incoming amid a yawning disconnect between customers and the experiences brands are serving up to them – and the rise of chief customer officers being hired to plug that gap at pace while rewiring tech stacks and assuming cross-functional command.

Green is forecasting another double-digit growth year for Song – and hasn’t ruled out more acquisitions amid ongoing rumours it may yet also add broader media buying capability to the mix as it seeks true vertical services integration.

End-to-end delivery?

Eyebrows were raised last year when one of those new breed of mega remit CCOs, Tabcorp’s Jenni Barnett, hired both Accenture Song and WPP's Ogilvy for a major overhaul, the former taking brand strategy and the latter scooping CX duties. Sceptics pointed out that both firms tout end-to-end credentials, but neither landed the full remit.

Green though said demand for one ring to bind them all – from top of funnel through acquisition and retention to personalised customer experience – is booming. Rather than plug any perceived gaps, he said the Lumery deal, which sees circa 80 staff join Accenture Song, brings greater firepower.

“We had we had a good team in marketing technology, with capabilities around personalisation, CRM and customer experience, but we wanted to double down on the on the quality and the strength in that area,” he told Mi3. “We wanted more scale.” Though he added, that as with its undeniable creative capability with The Monkeys, design with Fjord and a highly regarded ecom unit, there was a need to ensure its martech heft likewise becomes “the best in the market”.

Accenture’s main rivals have already strengthened their own armies. Deloitte Digital two years ago swooped on a trio of martech and CX services businesses, claiming the deals made it “Australia’s “largest provider of marketing technology and digital experience offerings” with circa 1,100 staff.

Green said the Lumery deal takes Accenture Song’s ANZ footprint close to 1,300, though that number includes some on-the-books offshore staff. Some three years in the making, he cited “an alignment” between the two firms on how all the pieces fit together as central to the acquisition, while enabling Song to do more of the end-to-end work Green said is in high demand, and insisted is already being delivered.

“No – we are doing that in quite a lot of places,” he said. “For us, that is where you can really drive acquisition from the top of the funnel right through to delivery of that one-to-one personalised experience. And so we're working with a whole bunch of clients where we offer that today, and I think really, it's probably that the team is stretched. We needed a bigger army and the Lumery were, in my opinion, the best in that category that were independent, had scale, had a great team and a good client base.”

The acquired roster includes the likes of Visit Victoria, Sports Bet, Realestate.com, Myer and Jetstar, some of which Green said were already shared clients, some of which "could be bigger for Song broadly".

Customer chiefs rise

Structurally, The Lumery will sit within Song’s marketing practice, alongside The Monkeys. But Green is clear that collaboration between verticals also spanning commerce, design and digital products and service, consumer strategy, technology and AI – is key to avoiding siloed capabilities in a business with a single P&L designed to solve growing frustration with fragmented services.

“That’s what my job has effectively been over the last few years – how do we actually bring more [integrated services] to a client?” said Green. “It’s not a faint wish to do these things. We’ve actually got the skills to deliver it … That's why we've settled with Raj and his team, because we feel like they believe it,” he added. “And they've got the empathy for the strategy and creativity that's required to do it.”

Lumery’s Kumar said demand to better join the dots is being driven by brands internal reorganisations.

“We’re seeing that play out inside the enterprise, the rise of the CCO bringing together all these concepts around customer, data, personalisation, brand advertising into a singular leadership because as consumers we want it connected – and so the enterprise has to be able to connect it,” said Kumar. “So bringing all of these capabilities together under one roof mirrors what’s happening on the brand and the consumer side.”

Per Green, those structural shifts mean chief marketing, chief information and chief technology officers “can no longer work in isolation” (the likes of Lion have already read the runes, amalgamating all three CMO, CIO and CTO remits under Chief Customer Officer Anubha Sahasrabuddhe).

He thinks that convergence will increase.

“How you connect with the customer has changed so drastically that you actually need someone that can bring all those pieces together within an organisation. They actually have to bring all of those pieces together, because the experience has to sit on technology that allows the client and the customer to connect in the right kinds of kinds of ways,” he said.

“We're seeing in the world right now, where this isn't working. Customers are incredibly dissatisfied with the product and service that's been delivered. We’re trying to bring an answer to the chief customer officer or CEO who wants to find new ways to grow, to serve customers in a better way.”

Stack slicing ahead

Kumar sees “three big trends” underway across CX and martech.

“The first, and it’s been happening for the last few years, is the focus on customer data, where is it being housed, leveraged and actioned. We've had the CDP rise, we're seeing the rise of the reverse ETL and those types of concepts,” he said. (Essentially ETLs, or extract-transform-load systems move data from source, i.e. the client, to the data warehouse to get it all in one place and cleaned up, whereas reverse ETLs push the data back from the warehouse so the brands can actually use it). “So that space is getting a lot of attention for a number of reasons,” per Kumar. “Clearly from a privacy legislation, security perspective, it's a huge focus. But also, because ultimately none of this matters if we can't activate the customer data at scale. We need it in the right hands so that business users can do something with it."

The second trend is ongoing stack slicing. “We're seeing constant rationalisation of spend throughout the entire stack. So, where do we need to be more efficient, where do we need to review our current investments? That’s accelerating more and more [within] marketing automation and analytics,” said Kumar. “Gone are the days where you could get away with having, three, four or five flavours of the same thing.”

The third is effectively why the likes of Accenture and The Lumery think acquisition deal makes sense. Kumar said big firms, after “talking about personalisation for years” are asking more pointedly “what is stopping us achieving that, is it the technology, the strategy or the customer experience?” Across the piste, he said the top end of town is now tightly focused on driving a whole result from the sum of expensively assembled parts.

Which bodes well for Kumar's new life under Accenture's roof.

More M&A incoming?

Accenture’s last big deal locally – it bought research and insights business Fiftyfive5 and its 200 staff for a rumoured $170m in December 2022 – offers something of a range finder for the kind of money it paid to acquire The Lumery.

While the consulting firms have focused on tech, data and insight acquisition in the years since making some big deals for creative agencies, there have been persistent rumours that Accenture Song locally was mulling the addition of broader media buying capability to its internal digital unit. Green wouldn’t be drawn, but didn’t rule it out and did namecheck Publicis and Omnicom – along with the large consulting firms – when asked how Accenture Song’s competitive set is shifting.

“We will do acquisitions where they make sense, where we find alignment on our strategy around customer growth … We're always looking would be the answer.” 

Either way, Green’s confident that Song will power another year of “high double digit growth”, organically or otherwise. “We’re one of the standout performers in the group, both locally and globally.”