Accenture Song’s media arm has for the first time revealed its proposition on stage at AdNews Perth L!VE.
In the first public appearance since launching the new media offering six months ago, industry trio Melissa Fein, Sam Geer and Chris Colter have teased what they believe to be the "most ambitious media proposition in the world".
At the core, the media offering has several proprietary tools including media trading, has ambitious acquisition plans and will completely avoid principal media buying.
These strategies, amongst others not yet revealed, have been developed by the trio’s conversations with agency folk, media partners and CMOs to directly address the challenges that advertising faces internationally.
Of course the proposition is already in action with the agency in competitive pitch mode and currently shortlisted for Optus' media pitch.
Principal media buying is a normal industry secret among holding group media agency, which is not in service to the client the trio believes.
As a result, Accenture Song will not be pursuing this "non-transparent" media tactic.
“I do not believe the myth that secrecy and hiding behind a contract creates value,” managing director media Sam Geer said.
“Ultimately in principal media buying the agency is being incentivised to maximise their own yield - that is undeniable and is not in service to the client.
“Part of our six months in building this proposition was around asking how can we change this non-transparent model and create something that still delivers the value and efficiency without writing our partners and ourselves into the ground.”
Proprietary tools is another core pillar of their strategy, from bespoke AI solutions to trading buying tools.
“We are trading. I feel that was a surprise to everyone and I don't understand why the market seems to believe it's impossible to set up a new trading function,” Geer said.
“I would hazard a guess they want you to believe that it's not. Yes it takes time, but we have taken that time and we have done it properly with amazing tech guys at Accenture Song helping us do that.
“Particularly around our trading philosophy we will be transparent with every dollar we are spending and making from clients.”
Accenture Song admits there has been a lot of industry speculations about its agency acquisitions.
Specifically last year Accenture was speculated to be buying independent agency Atomic 212, which has later bought by Publicis.
While certainly acquiring an independent agency is part of their strategy, the trio made the decision to put it on the back-burner until the agency proposition is fully fleshed out.
“Accenture has been amazing at empowering us with these decisions as we want to genuinely build out our capability first,” Accenture Song ANZ managing director media APAC Melissa Fein said.
“AI solutions, for example, are something we are so focused on and are able to deliver literally today because we’ve spent six months building our agents from scratch and we can show clients how that works through live demos.
“We spent our first six months answering some of these challenges and headwinds, so then we can go to market for acquisition because acquisition isn't just a growth need.
“We're not going to acquire just to get scale right. There are some amazing independent agencies in this market, we'll certainly be looking for different needs around talent, scale or capability.”
This is definitely the harder way to build an agency, managing director media strategy Chris Colter said.
“The easy way is to back through a hold or acquire an agency,” Colter said.
“But what we have been given is a big responsibility, so we want to do it properly, from scratch and do it well.
“Our philosophy is build the offering right and use acquisition strategies to make it even stronger.”
AdNews would like to thank supporting partners Nine, Audience 360 and Nexxen alongside associate partners JuiceBox, MiQ and LiSTNR for making the event possible. As well as Friends of AdNews WAMA, PADC, and IMAA.
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