Reinventing media: how Accenture Song plans to overhaul media

Accenture Song’s highly anticipated media business is officially up and running and the trio behind it are determined to reinvent media and deliver positive change to the industry.

14/11/2024. Accenture Song Media Team executives, photographed at their offices in Sydney’s Barangaroo. Melissa Fein, Chris Colter and Sam Geer. Britta Campion / The Australian

Accenture Song Media’s leadership team believe they have a “once in a generation” opportunity to reinvent media, fix the problems and create new transparent processes.

Speaking for the first time since joining the business two months ago, managing directors Melissa Fein, Sam Geer and Chris Colter said the business would combine an agentic workforce and senior strategic talent to create an end-to-end media service for clients.

The ambition is to provide chief marketing officers with a media plan that is 80 per cent automated and the other 20 per cent is comprised of innovative strategic planning and seamless execution, which has been collaboratively led by senior talent.

“We’re not just focusing on one end of the funnel or the other end of the funnel, we want an end-to-end proposition, because Accenture Song is an end-to-end customer proposition,” said Mr Geer.

The launch of the media business has been highly anticipated since the trio resigned en-masse from their roles at IPG Media’s Initiative in May. Widely regarded as the best pitching team in the country, they have built a formidable reputation for driving growth. However, Ms Fein said after lengthy careers in the industry, they were perplexed by the legacy issues within holding companies.

“Over the last few years, the industry has reached an inflection point and we felt there is a need to do things differently. We wanted to create real and positive change in the industry and be a positive force,” she said.

“But, you need scale, investment and technology to be able to instrumentally change the way that you create a capability around media.”

Mr Colter added, “We knew we wanted to reinvent media as we’ve been trying to do that throughout our entire careers. But at the exact same point, the technological leaps that we’ve all experienced in culture, have reached this tipping point where all of a sudden you’re moving in a system where you can realise the decades old promise of media automation, and, remove the bloated staffing structures, and actually give clients higher-end strategic advisory but backed with the efficiency that you can deliver through a tech powered future.

“And all of a sudden you’ve got machines that don’t just call and respond, but autonomously work, we’re actually able to realise what the industry has been promising for decades.”

The lure of Accenture’s legacy in technology and digital, plus the opportunity to work collaboratively as a team, and build a media business for the evolving environment, was too good to ignore.

The process has been lengthy with the trio spending time talking to chief marketing officers and media companies, as well as the experts within Accenture Song’s companies such as Lumery, Fiftyfive5, Droga5, and across the design, data and business consulting divisions.

The most crucial element is to reinvent media and not to replicate the outdated structures and systems that are causing headaches within the holding companies. As Accenture Song global chief executive David Droga told The Growth Agenda last month, “I don’t want us to replicate the old media model, because I think that’s why the traditional (players) are in peril, because they’ve built their business around stalking the media dollars.”

To this end the team are adamant there will not be the “opaque transparency” of principal media, rather the aim is to deliver on transparency, along with strategic leadership and leveraging technology.

Mr Geer said, “One of the biggest differences we’ll be offering clients is a genuinely agentic workforce. Because, despite all the talk about automation, media is still primarily manual, specifically the implementation process and so much of this is tedious, repeatable tasks, which are fraught with error. That agentic workforce is going to be a really, really big part of this proposition, one that minimises errors, maximises efficiency and even just time to market.

“This sort of set up, changes the shape of a team for clients, because it means we can deliver a flipped model, where, instead of having one or two strategic people you might see once a month on your business as a client, you have experienced, grown up strategic leaders on your business in every single vertical.

“And when I say strategic, I don’t just mean strategy. I mean your account leader should be the most strategic account leader, your investment person should be the most strategic investment person, and because they have time to focus on the thinking, because they’re not bogged down, doing the monotonous tasks, they’re not in Excel all day putting ones in boxes, we feel like we can leapfrog the competition by doing that.

“We plan to be radically transparent and our clients will be our partner in the decisions. We won’t make them on your behalf in a room that you are not in for our own interest. We will have you in the room. You will be next to us, and we will advise you on those decisions, and we’ll make them together with full visibility and our tools and technology will support that.”

Accenture Song Media is already putting the new approach to work on media pitches. “There’s a few that we are focused on and there’s a few we’ve had to turn down,” said Ms Fein. “We are being very strategic in these early days and we want to reward those who come on the journey with us first, but we can’t be everywhere right now.”

The team is adamant that despite the existing relationship with NRMA Insurance, an Initiative Media client, which earlier this year appointed Accenture Song to manage its end-to-end proposition, they will not be encroaching on that client’s media business. “Non-competes aside, there’s so many other clients within the business already to focus on,” said Mr Geer.

The media business has a number of paths to new business through media-only pitches, adding media strategy to existing clients and through end-to-end propositions across the entire Accenture Song business. The latter is one that offers huge advantages, according to Mr Colter.

“There is serendipity in us leveraging this technology and automating our systems,” he said. “The advancement in technology is going to raise the floor of the industry pretty rapidly and we’re going to see clients fighting for little incremental gains here and there.

“So, strategic advisory and creative thinking, looking at things through a completely different lens, is going to be the pure source of competitive opportunity and advantage for marketers in this space.

“We’ve built our careers on proving that media can be as distinctive as the creative that it distributes, and when you deliver that, it delivers compounding effectiveness, and it helps unlock entirely new sources of growth for your business.”