Happy New Year!
At Executive Connections LLC, our executive search/placement business is a leading indicator of business activity, either upward or downward, based upon the intentions of global CEOs.
We are pleased to report we see continued strength on the horizon with many signs of strong talent acquisition demands on both the marketing and marketing services sides of our business.
Marketers, and their CMOs, are focused on reimagining omni-channel customer experience, in addition to branding, communications, and marketing. This has resulted in CMOs transitioning to Chief Experience Officers, heightening demand for talent in Analytics and Customer Experience (CX), in addition to traditional Branding, Communications, and Marketing.
Marketing Services firms (Agency Holding Companies & Technology Consultancies) are increasingly focused on assisting CMOs, CIOs, and CXOs in transforming global omni-channel customer experience, and the market share gains and inroads over the past 5-10 years by technology insurgents (including Accenture Interactive & Deloitte Digital) have led many industry analysts to the conclusion the technology consultancies are setting the tone for the future.
We are including in this month’s issue an interesting article published last week by Allison Schiff at AdExchanger, an interview with Andy Main, CEO of Deloitte Digital, titled Deloitte Digital: We’re Setting The Tone For The Future, Not Trying To Invade And Take Over Agencies”
We wish all of our clients and friends a safe, prosperous New Year…..and we look forward to working together as talent acquisition needs arise in 2019!
Best,
Jeff Gundersen
CEO & Founder
Deloitte Digital: ‘We’re Setting The Tone For The Future, Not Trying To Invade And Take Over Agencies’
by Allison Schiff // Wednesday, January 2nd, 2019
Andy Main, head of Deloitte Digital, is a little tired of hearing people say consultancies are trying to muscle the agencies off of Madison Avenue.
“I’d actually say the agencies are trying to copy the Deloitte Digitals of the world,” Main said. “And when someone copies you, I guess you should be flattered.”
Unlike Accenture, which launched its own programmatic services unit in May, Deloitte Digital isn’t much enamored of the media game. Leave that to the duopoly, Main said, and, well, the media agencies.
“We actually work with a ton of media agencies and placement companies, and we partner with Facebook and Google, to bring that part of the repertoire to the client,” he said. “We think that focusing on owned media is a much better use of marketing spend than paid, because you can capture first-party data and use it for personalization.”
AdExchanger chatted with Main about agency mergers, digital transformation and the changing role of the CMO.
AdExchanger: Deloitte Digital describes itself as a “creative digital consultancy.” How’s that different from, well, an agency?
ANDY MAIN: When we started, we were focused on helping businesses compete on customer experience and customer relationships. A lot of that was on the creative front-end. We bought Magnetic in September for analytics and algorithms to feed into the experience, and that required the confluence of technical design, business skills and creative. We scaled our creative and digital consulting to reflect that. It’s about business model innovation and enabling businesses to come up with new value propositions.
In a way, Martin Sorrell is copying that model with S4. He bought a programmatic business [in MightyHive], but if you look more closely, it’s really about technology plus design, marketing and experience all wrapped together.
Any plans to acquire a programmatic media company of your own or launch a programmatic service unit like Accenture?
We place media through Facebook and DoubleClick. It’s not as if we don’t do it, it just hasn’t been a focus on the business, and that’s because the margins in media are so poor. Why would I enter a market others want to get out of?
We also thoroughly believe in the notion of ecosystem. If you don’t have an asset yourself, but you have a friend who does – like media, for us – why not simply partner?
When brands bring you in, I assume you sometimes find yourself sitting around a conference room table with people from their agencies. Does that ever get awkward?
It’s usually quite friendly. We’re not really adversaries. We’ve all got one common interest and that’s to serve the client we’re working with.
There’s a narrative out there that consultancies are pretty much trying to steamroll Madison Avenue, though. Fair?
I’d actually say we’re setting the tone for the future, not trying to invade and take over agencies. The media business has essentially already been taken over by Facebook and Google, and they’re the ones eating the agencies’ lunch, not us. Agencies with a media-heavy bias to their business model are struggling to shed that as a main source of revenue, but they can’t change quickly enough.
What do you think about the recent spate of agency mergers, like Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R?
It’s inevitable. It makes total sense to merge these assets together, and I would do the same if I were running a holding company, because the market needs greater versatility from agencies. One way to get that is by combining the bits you’ve already got.
But big companies haven’t been taught to work this way, and agencies within a holding company are often competitive on the P&Ls and generally suspicious of each other. Culturally, this sort of thing is very hard to pull off. It’s not as easy as it might sound when it’s being described in a press release.
Seems like everything’s in flux. How about the CMO role? How has that changed over the last year?
CMOs are more like chief experience officers now. Their job description is being redefined, because there has to be messaging at all touchpoints, not just when someone is buying something. Smart CMOs have realized that they need to care about the entire customer experience, not just marketing, awareness and demand generation.
We’re also seeing a trend toward more moments-based customer experience design as opposed to linear progressions and journey maps, which are outliving their usefulness. People don’t operate conveniently in sequential steps – they operate in moments that best suit their lives.
Now’s probably a good time to talk about digital transformation. How are you helping brands through that evolutionary process?
Digital transformation is about discovering unmet human needs to help a business win for the future, and that means figuring out what needs to be transformed across experience and services. Marketing agencies aren’t doing that, because they only really focus on marketing, awareness, influencing me to buy a new product.
Marketing is the thing you do at the end of business transformation, once you’ve figured out what you’re transforming to. For a life insurance company like Transamerica, that means helping them rethink the intersection between health and wealth, while for a Starbucks or a Chipotle, the unmet need might be enabling people to order ahead so they don’t have to wait in line.
Our job is to flip these unmet needs into an offering and put it into the market quickly and successfully. To do that, you need to be super adaptive and have strategy skills, innovation skills, creative skills, digital technology skills and human-centered design all under one roof. Marketing is an integral part of transforming a business, but it comes in toward the end of the journey, and it’s far from the only thing a business has to solve for.
How do you approach hiring talent?
Our hiring is tied to the agency world. A lot of people have come to us from Sapient and Razorfish, in particular, because they’re looking for more of a confluence between technology and creativity. That’s appealing to a lot of creatives.
“Cagency,” “consulgency,” “agencelcy” – all of these are terrible, but what portmanteau should we use when the line between agency and consultancy gets completely blurred?
Ha. I’ll have to get back to you on that.
Congratulations, Taylor!
EC wants to acknowledge Taylor Patchen, Director of AR/VR Brand Strategy at Vertebrae, for recently being named one of the “Top 30 Under 30” in Marketing & Advertising by FORBES magazine. Congratulations Taylor, who was an EC “Rising Star” in 2013 at the outset of her marketing career.
Current Career Opportunities
Chris Hendren – Managing Director – Analytics, Retail & Technology
EC is pleased to announce Aileen Cahill has joined our client Prudential Financial – Workplace Solutions Group as Director, Customer Experience. Aileen is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) & Classically-trained CPG brand marketer who blends “Big Data” analytics with marketing expertise to create engaging omnichannel CX. She began her career in CPG with such brands as Hershey, Pepsi, Conagra. She worked in consulting with a variety of companies including Peppers and Rodgers helping major brands become more digitally savvy and driving them towards 1 to 1 Marketing. She has also served as a CMO for an internet startup and global Veterinarian healthcare company. She has specialized in Customer Experience since 2009 when she became the chief customer officer at Hurley travel. In the last few years she was the SVP Client Partner Retail and Consumer Goods for Merkle, and the cofounder of a small full-service Customer Experience consulting firm called Agile Marketing. Aileen has been a professor and lecturer at Cornell, Northwestern Harvard, Chicago and the USM. She also published a book Internet Marketing -Building Advantage into a Networked Economy. She has a BA in Applied Analytics from SUNY Binghamton and an MBA from in Marketing from Cornell. Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX at EC, managed this exclusive search for Prudential.
EC is pleased to announce Liza Amezquita has joined our client Prudential Financial – Workplace Solutions Group as Manager, Customer Experience. Liza is a certified Customer Experience professional. She has been working at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield for the last 11 years, earning 4 promotions along the way. She worked in Customer Experience, Product Development, Underwriting, Sales, and Customer Service. Prior to Horizon Liza worked at Rapid Recovery as a project manager and sales leader. In her early career she worked in medical billing for Ortho Shockwave Consultants, Pediatric Ophthalmic Consultants and EBI. Liza has a BA in Theatre Arts from Rutgers and an MBA in Risk Management from Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City. Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX at EC, managed this exclusive search for Prudential.