德勤涉足广告业务，年收入15亿刀
文|Shareen Pathak 2015年8月17日
几年前，有个甲方市场部高管向Mike Brinker展示了张关系图，里面列出了这位高管业务上要合作的人，其中有创意、供应、采购、咨询等。这些人加在一起能串出75条关系线。Brinker看完说：“这太抓狂了”。
Mike Brinkers是德勤咨询的掌舵人，他逮到个机会把这事弄简单了，4年前他促成了德勤Digital，隶属于德勤咨询大巨人旗下。德勤Digital去年营收15亿美元，它能提的服务涵盖战略、物流、税务咨询。
如今，德勤Digital运营4年有余，在全球范围内雇佣了6,000多员工，在母公司德勤咨询下面混得风生水起。德勤咨询去年的总营收是340.2亿美元。Brinker说：“只提供些点子是会死翘翘的，如果你想要有点影响，就得做高大上的策略”。德勤不光能提供传统的创意和营销分析，它更专注于高屋建瓴的策略需求上。
德勤在咨询界的竞争者们也在这块蛋糕上下注。埃森哲成立了埃森哲互动公司；麦肯锡也在缓慢的拓展代理业务。埃培智集团的CEO Michael Roth在3月的财报会议上表示，这些新秀们已把这片市场变成了红海。我们还能看到诸如Adobe和Epsilon这样的公司不断加入进来。除了自身的核心产品外，这些公司也把触角延伸到了广告咨询服务领域。
Pivotal分析师Brian Wieser表示：“德勤、IBM、毕马威、普华永道都是代理服务的巨人。其实换个角度来看，你可以把代理公司看做是个外包的市场部。他们做了甲方市场人员不会亲力亲为的事情。这些事，就是前面几个公司正在做的。”
并不是所有人都看好这个趋势。业内普遍抱怨的点是，这些新秀没法像传统代理公司一样提供创意。实际上，传统广告公司把这些新秀们称为“伪广告公司”，是一群自娱自乐的人。Wieser说：“拒绝他们的客户认为这群人来自税务公司，世界那么大，他们把脑袋放错了地方。”对于甲方市场部来说，决定用不用一家公司的原因是，这里有个事儿得靠他们做，而不是他们很特别。
上周，披萨连锁品牌Papa Murphy's成了德勤Digital的客户。德勤负责帮Papa Murphy's提高在线订餐量。Brinker表示，一方面德勤要做单纯广告公司应做的事：重新设计网站，更新品牌信息；另一方面，德勤建起了一个新的电子商务平台，并依托母公司的实力，给出了供应链、物流方面的策略，以帮助未来业务增长。
“如果电子商务项目需要，我们也会把税务专家请来。业务之间，没有那么明显的分界线，”Brinker说道。
德勤Digital还提供按成果付款的合作方式。“成果达成才付钱”模式在代理公司的世界里是朵奇葩。Brinker说：“我们投入到了整个项目中来。”咨询公司也在靠规模来取胜，把成百的经理级员工投到项目中。而这对于一般的广告公司来说是不可能的。
德勤开启了并购潮。5月，它买下了瑞典的Mobiento。去年，买了Flow Interactive。几年前，吞并了西雅图的Banyan Branch和Ubermind。去年6月，在伦敦开张，创造了4,000多个就业机会。一个月前，在新加坡成立办公室，专攻东南亚市场。也是在上个月，挖角Sapient的Alan Shulman，委以纽约产品和设计工作室掌门人之责。这个大动静引起了业界广泛关注。
Brinker表示：“咨询是个全球业务，我们提供的是专业服务。那我们为什么不能增加个广告业务呢？我们名声在外，我们的任务是帮助品牌进化。”
Inside Deloitte’s $1.5 billion ad agency
Shareen Pathak @shareenpathak August 17, 2015
A few years ago, a chief marketing officer at a big brand showed Mike Brinker a diagram that depicted all the different marketing partners he worked with. There were creative people, supply-chain and logistics people, a consulting company (or two). In all, there were 75 different spokes and wheels. “It was crazy,” said Brinker.
It was the opportunity to simplify that process that drove Brinker, a principal at Deloitte Consulting, to found Deloitte Digital, an agency within the consulting behemoth four years ago. Last year, with the ability to provide everything from strategy to logistics to tax help to agency services, Deloitte Digital did $1.5 billion in revenue.
Now four years old, the agency part of the business has 6,000 people globally and sits squarely within Deloitte Consulting, its parent company ($34.2 billion in revenue last year). It identifies itself as a digital and consulting agency. “Just doing ideation is a dead model,” said Brinker. “If you want to have an impact, you need to do high-level strategy.” The idea is that Deloitte can deliver on those high-level strategy needs, as well as traditional creative and campaign analytics.
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It’s a bet plenty of Deloitte’s consulting competitors have made, too: Accenture has Accenture Interactive (the third-biggest digital agency network after Deloitte and IBM, according to AdAge DataCenter) while McKinsey has also slowly built an agency arm. Michael Roth, CEO of Interpublic Group, acknowledged the growing competition back in March during an earnings call, saying that these new entrants have made it a “difficult competitive market out there.” It also joins tech companies like Adobe and Epsilon, which have added a service component in the form of an agency to their core product offering.
“Deloitte, along with Accenture and IBM and to a lesser degree KMPG and PwC have long been sleeping giants in agency services,” said Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser. “If you take a step back, agencies are outsourced marketing departments with specialities in things marketers don’t do themselves. So that’s what these guys are doing.”
The trend is not without its detractors. The most common complaint is that these shops can’t provide the creative chops that traditional agencies can. In fact,some traditional agency execs have been known to refer to this new breed of shops as “faux-agencies.” They may do so at their own risk. “People who dismiss them as ‘that tax company’ have a misplaced sense of their role in the universe,” said Wieser.The marketer isn’t hiring an agency because it’s special. It’s because they have a job and they need to get it done.”
Last week, the agency landed pizza chain Papa Murphy’s as a client with an assignment to improve online ordering. That work is at one end of the spectrum for Deloitte Digital, said Brinker, a “pure-play” agency assignment where the agency will redesign a website and refresh the brand. On the other end of the spectrum are projects with Toms, where the agency helped build a new e-commerce platform and called upon its parent company’s capabilities with supply-chain and logistics to create a strategy for future business growth. “We pull in tax experts, for example if we need it for an e-commerce project,” said Brinker. “It’s all becoming a blur.”
The agency offers pay-for-performance billing: It gets paid when an agreed-upon business result is achieved, a growing trend but still a rarity in the agency world. “We put our own skin in the game,” said Brinker. The consulting companies also compete on scale — they can put hundreds of managers on projects, something standalone digital shops can’t envision.
Deloitte has been on something of an acquisition spree: In May, it acquired a digital agency in Sweden called Mobiento. Last year, it was UX shop Flow Interactive. A couple of years ago, it acquired Seattle-based shop Banyan Branch as well as mobile company Ubermind. Last June, it opened doors in London, pledging to create over 4,000 jobs in that city. A month ago, it opened an office in Singapore to service the Southeast Asian market. Also last month, it hired Sapient exec Alan Shulman to head a newly opened content design and product studio in New York, a big move that got many in the industry paying attention.
“Consulting is a global business, and all we do is professional services in that regard. Why not add agency services to that?” said Brinker. “We’ve already established ourselves and our credibility in helping brands transform.”