The shiny new thing in accounting and consulting firms these days is the purchase of an advertising agency.

Accenture did it recently with their multimillion-dollar purchase of Sydney-based creative outfit The Monkeys, PwC signalled their intention to come over all creative when they brought Russel "One L" Howcroft on board and even KPMG's Paul Howes took another step in vaguely the same direction last week with the appointment to his in-house "Customer, Brand and Marketing" team of Google's Lisa Bora.