Accenture in adland: the battle of the endangered species?

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• I wrote a somewhat scalding piece about Accenture’s shopping spree last week.
• Pessimistic and gloomy some folks called it.
• I received lots of comments trying to convince me to see the glass half full.
• Your optimism is sweet and endearing, folks.
• No offense taken, naturally.
• I love you and hold your opinions in high regard.
• But quit dreaming already.
• Accenture’s irruption in our backyard is a very bad omen.
• Let’s take a step back.
• When Rupert Murdoch acquired The Wall Street Journal, it was not a bad day for journalism.
• Whatever you might think of good ol’ Rupert (ruthless megalomaniac, tabloid buccaneer, morally lax ideologue) it is undeniable that he is a newspaper man.
• He loves the smell of ink in the morning.
• On the other hand, when Jeff Bezos bagged The Washington Post, it was indeed a sad day for the trade.
• The venerable Graham clan who had owned the WaPo for 80 years gave it up for a meager $250 million.
• I love Jeff, he is one of my idols, but he obviously bought the WaPo with an ulterior motive.
• He did it from a pedestal of hubris, under the belief that he knows better, that he can fix the broken newspaper business model.
• Or maybe subsidize it with the spare change in his deep pockets.
• No journalist in his or her sane mind should sleep at night when the dude who pulverized mom & pop bookstores and other assorted retailers is the new boss.
• If that’s not defeat I don’t know what is.
• Cut to Madison Avenue.
• No matter how we spin it, Accenture’s shopping spree is a travesty.
• Capitulation.
• I am willing to go on the record to say that Accenture will tear apart the creative agencies it is acquiring and suck out their souls.
• It will keep its founders as figureheads for a while and fire them quietly when the dust settles.*
• This is a company built on the assumption that it can send its foot soldiers to a candy maker today and to a pharmaceutical company tomorrow and tell them what they are doing wrong (the unconsummated wet dream of every ad executive who’s ever lived).
• There’s no way in hell it will even try to understand what it bought.
• It will do what it does best: layoffs.
• See, Accenture’s business model is quite similar to ours: billable hours.
• They are not bringing new thinking or new tech to the equation.
• There’s no “disruption” here.
• This is just a textbook consolidation move by good ol’ consultants.
• They are as desperate and disoriented as we ad people are.
• Just a little more flush with cash.
• They are fighting the bogey man of automatization with a one-tool toolbox nonetheless.
• Am I implying that we should somehow prevent these “mergers” from happening with, say, some sort of corporate poison pill or through lobbying to pass legislation hedging adland against hostile takeovers?
• Course not.
• The last thing we want is the government sheltering us through artificial policy, which will only prolong the agony with some illusory bonanza (see Brazil’s bizarre mandate that only agencies who create a campaign can buy the media to run it).
• Nanny state policies (aka corporate welfare) only make the inexorable day of reckoning more painful.
• By NO means am I saying that what Accenture is doing is bad, wrong or should be stopped.
• We deserve it, we had it coming.
• We were asleep at the wheel for a long time, coasting, basking in our comfort zone.
• They have all the right in the world to buy us out.
• When a shark gobbles up a cute seal it is not wrong nor is it bad.
• It is just the survival of the fittest.
• Natural selection.
• The food chain at work.
• Mother nature doing her bidding.
• My hypothesis here is, maybe, we’re just witnessing a small dinosaur being eaten by a bigger one.

*Kevin Systrom, Instragram’s cofounder, and Brian Acton, cofounder of Whatsapp, left the companies they built shortly after selling to Facebook due to irreconcilable differences with, you guessed it, The Zuck. Richard Plepler, mastermind behind HBO’s success for decades, left the company he joined in 1992 and co-presided over since 2007 just months after AT&T acquired it last year.