Accenture Interactive's major challenge in establishing a programmatic service offering will be finding the highly specialised talent required to help clients inhouse and manage their trading desks.
That's the verdict from a handful of media agencies AdNews approached after the global consultancy unveiled plans to enter programmatic consulting.
Accenture Interactive confirmed to AdNews its programmatic service offering will be rolled out in Australia.
“This is all part of our laser-focus on helping clients create the best customer experiences on the planet,” a spokesperson said.
“We offer programmatic trading locally and are focused on ensuring our clients get better transparency, connection to the end customer and are able to drive greater efficiencies within their marketing execution.”
The move is designed to tap into a growing distrust between clients and agency partners over opaque programmatic trading practices.
These were exposed in some detail at Tuesday's AANA media forum.
The in-housing of programmatic trading is by no means a new concept; media agencies have seen several clients attempt it to varying degrees of success in recent years. In fact agencies often help clients make this transition.
What is new is that a pure play management consultancy is attempting to provide this service to set up internal trading desks.
A question of talent
Maxus national head of investment Ricky Chanana believes Accenture Interactive believes the biggest challenge Accenture Interactive will face is finding the right talent to run the operation, particularly against agencies that offer years of expertise.
“Getting into this with no prior experience, talent or [programmatic] tech background is going to be a challenge. Their background is auditing and transparency but transparency is only one element of programmatic," he said.
Accenture, although a conulting firm since 1989, originated from the failed professional services firm Arthur Andersen.
“They are probably thinking because they're transparency experts they can create a whole new notion about trading desks for a client but I think this could put the industry a couple of years back.
“You look at the businesses that have been doing programmatic for years, the Xaxis, Cadreons and others – there's about 35 data scientists sifting through past campaigns understanding a plethora of tech offerings.”
Divorcing offline and online
Bohemia managing partner Brett Dawson points out that in-housing has been happening for a number of years but the major challenge for clients is finding the right technology and talent to manage a programmatic trading desk.
“Accenture's move to consult in that space makes sense. But what we don't want to see here is what I call different swim lanes or isolation.
“The influence offline has on online and vice versa is phenomenal so the risk here is that the left hand becomes divorced from the right.
Emphasising the point, Dawson points to examples of how much social activity is driven by tent pole television shows, such as My Kitchen Rules, Married At First Sight or The Bachelor.
“The only way to mitigate against that is to have a very open line of communication between what a client is doing digitally and grammatically and what an agency is doing,” Dawson adds.
“You have to question whether clients are pulling it in-house because they don't trust the agency and wont share the results, that's potentially a recipe in disaster.”
He believes the move towards in-housing is being driven by a lack of trust in the client-media agency relationship.
'A large undertaking'
PHD Australia managing director Mark Jarrett expects professional services consultancies will make some traction in the media and marketing space and agrees finding talent will be their biggest challenge.
“They're in an early phase in this market and they've got to look at who they're going to recruit. How they attack and approach is to be decided,” he tells AdNews.
“The amount of knowledge of tech that you need to be constantly engaged in is huge. To commit to that as a marketing department for a company that specialises in something completely different is a big undertaking, which is why a lot of people are interested in [in-housing] but so few have gone and done it.”
“There are a lot of potential minefields in such a big undertaking but some have done it and there can be success in it.”
Accenture Interactive has recently hired a new content lead Stephen Hamil and marketing services lead Irwin Lim. Agencies will be keenly monitoring how it builds its programmatic capability.
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