Consultancies can’t just ‘buy culture’, Sorrell says
Sir Martin Sorrell has described consultancy groups buying creative agencies as “a bit strange” and questioned if they can “buy culture”.
WPP’S chief executive told Campaign that Accenture’s purchase in May of The Monkeys “strikes me as a bit odd” and that similar acquisitions by other consultancies were also “odd”. Accenture bought Karmarama in 2016.
Sorrell said consulting and creativity were very different: “Traditionally, those consultants have worked with chief information officers or chief technology officers on the left brain; we’ve tended to work with chief marketing officers on the right brain.”
He went on: “If you ask the Accenture consultants whether you can buy culture, they would say no.”
Joy Bhattacharya, managing director of Accenture Interactive UK and Ireland, said it has a “culture of cultures” to allow consulting and creativity to work together and “solve” marketers’ challenges. “We recognise that today’s progressive marketer is a whole-brain marketer,” he said.
Citigroup has played down the rise of the consulting giants and suggested they would struggle to challenge ad groups such as WPP. “It is much harder to scale creative than technology,” Citigroup said in a report in May. “If the consultancies want to compete in agencies’ core business, larger-scale acquisitions will be needed.”