This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →Accenture’s acquisition of Whaler has triggered the usual speculation about consulting firms eyeing the agency business. But it’s only part of the story. The more interesting question is why now. Consulting firms have never particularly covered what agencies built — the margins are thin, the talent is expensive and the model is under pressure from every direction. What they covet is the moment. Creator marketing is becoming the enterprise-scale challenge that programmatic did a decade ago.
“Marketing, and now social-first creator economy, has come to the forefront of what used to be brand creative in the boardroom,” said Matthew Lacey, managing partner at Waypoint Partners.
When that happened and the dollars around it swelled, Accenture and its peers didn’t compete with agencies for the media billings. They went straight to the CMO and CFO who were already their clients and took the transformation budget. Agencies ran the campaigns, consultants built the stack.
The deal structure makes clear which side of that equation Accenture is playing here. It bought Whalar the agency — the client-facing part that sits in the room when marketing budgets get allocated — not Whalar Group. The rest stayed with the founders. It’s the same approach it took with programmatic. Accenture never acquired a media agency or a DSP. It positioned itself as the party that could tell clients which platform to use, how to integrate it and what to do when it broke.
