The relationship between Procter & Gamble, Accenture and Adchemy is the most fascinating marketing news of the quarter. It’s a non-intuitive decision by a company to innovate by hiring people from a completely unexpected background. It also shows why now is a fantastic time to be creating stories that connect customers, companies and products.
On 15 September, Accenture announced two pieces of news. The predictable: Accenture would become Procter & Gamble’s primary provider of Web technology infrastructure and services. The surprising: P&G would become the first big client of Accenture Interactive, a new digital marketing practice.
P&G is a powerhouse of consumer packaged goods ranging from Crest toothpaste to Pampers diapers, and spends an estimated $6 billion annually on advertising. It’s the largest advertiser in the world. To determine how to invest these resources, P&G chose not an advertising agency or a marketing firm, but a group of information systems consultants who split off from an accounting firm 20 years ago.
Then, on 20 October, Accenture announced an investment in Adchemy, a Silicon Valley developer of new technologies for Web advertising. An Accenture digital marketing director, Matthew Symons, told New York Times reporter Steve Lohr that the goal of Accenture/Adchemy is to identify types of website visitors and then deliver a customized, on-the-fly interactive experience that converts these visitors into buyers.
Accenture and Adchemy plan to integrate two previously separate platforms that analyze customer behavior, tailor marketing for audience segments, and provide feedback throughout the process. Tim Breene, Chief Strategy Officer for Accenture, describes this new territory — Audience Relationship Management — in terms of Customer Relationship Management. Where CRM coordinates a customer experience across multiple touch points, ARM tailors relationships with audiences before they become customers.
Details about the P&G project are scarce, but another Accenture digital marketing venture provides a few clues. In 2001, Accenture invested in a new advertising agency, AKQA, formed by the merger of several firms focused on new media, Web-building and “e-commerce.” (Now, it’s just called commerce.) Breene said in 2001 that AKQA would integrate CRM, marketing communications and advertising across every point of audience contact.
In eight years, AKQA has created a substantial number of interactive projects for Coca-Cola, Nike, McDonald’s, Visa and other brands. Last June, AKQA won a Cannes Lion, a prestigious global marketing award, for a Fiat project that shows how companies and customers can collaborate and build community in valuable new ways.
AKQA and Fiat developed Eco: Drive to make use of the data accumulated on computers embedded in automobiles. Eco: Drive collects information about driving habits on a memory key drive, which the driver then inserts into a personal computer at home. PC software from AKQA and Fiat analyzes the data to show trends and ways to conserve energy on future drives. It also enables the driver to participate in Ecoville, a global online community that creates meaning from driving data collected in the real world. This project shows environmental innovation from Fiat — not from Toyota or Honda, traditionally considered leaders in the field.
Eco: Drive is a digital marketing application for people who have already purchased the product. It’s exciting to think about collaborating and creating value with people who aren’t even customers yet.
Illustration from an AKQA – Fiat animation of the Eco: Drive project.
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A colleague and former employee of both Accenture and Procter & Gamble offers one explanation as to why a sophisticated marketing company like P&G made such a move:
“Procter & Gamble’s partnership with Accenture offers a contrast with Coca-Cola’s 1991 experiment of hiring Creative Artists Agency to work with McCann-Erickson to produce advertising. At the time, this was heralded as a revolution, but the talent-agency-as-ad-firm model never expanded beyond this one trial. Hollywood agents and producers do not necessarily have the same skills as ad agency creative directors (not that talent agencies can’t help with tasks such as product placement).
“The P&G/Accenture venture appears to have more staying power. The Coke/CAA experiment brought in new players to raise a company’s ‘hip’ quotient. P&G, on the other hand, recognizes that Web marketing is fundamentally different from mass marketing. Both types of marketing require strong creative work and good tactical skills (e.g., ad placement), but Web marketing requires a fantastically greater level of data analysis and information management. This where is the technical services of an Accenture come in: industry leaders are banding together to enhance marketing capabilities in completely new areas.”