Accenture wants to be world's biggest 'experience agency of record'

The digital marketing arm of consulting giant Accenture has talked about becoming the world's biggest digital agency but Anatoly Roytman, the London-based managing director of Accenture Interactive for Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, said the ambition to build the experience agency of record was greater.

"We want to partner our clients and become the custodian of the brand experience," Roytman told Campaign’s debut monthly print issue, which is published this week.

Roytman said the "brand experience" matters because chief marketing officers have to think about more than advertising and communications in a connected world that is going through digital transformation.

Now brands need an agency to manage the whole consumer experience and every touchpoint along the way – from the inception of an idea to developing and designing a product, building awareness and then selling and distributing it.

He said Accenture Interactive can be this new breed of shop – the experience agency of record – because it has built up a range of capabilities across design, user experience, data, analytics, customer relationship management, ecommerce, content, advertising and programmatic.

"We are close to being able to do the entire spectrum," he said.

Accenture, which employs 411,000 and has a stock market value of $84bn, has moved aggressively into marketing services since setting up Accenture Interactive in 2009 and bought 20 agencies, including Karmarama, Fjord and The Monkeys.

Roytman raised doubts about the traditional holding company model at a time when many agency groups are facing cuts by FMCG clients and questions about the efficacy of advertising itself.

"The holding companies are trying to become more like us," he said. "They’re trying to become a mixture of consulting plus creativity. They’ve got a big, big challenge. To ensure you have the correct set-up, when you have so many [agency] brands that are not collaborating, that are not integrated, it’s very difficult. They have to collapse themselves and create one P&L."