CANNES – Having recently made the move from the agency world to big-time consulting, Nikki Mendonca is directing Accenture’s worldwide efforts to help marketers gain more control over programmatic execution and counsel them on data-driven marketing.
“With programmatic, we’re starting with a lot of client interest in terms of them wanting to in house and gain more control over the programmatic execution,” Mendonca, who is Global President of Accenture Interactive Operations, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Many of Accenture’s clients want to build “a hybrid model in terms of programmatic execution,” so the company is helping them decide what to control in-house, how to staff for it and determine what they want Accenture to take over as a managed service, according to Mendonca.
“And then, of course, in time we’re building out our capabilities to be able to operate and scale global programmatic services for clients.”
Until January of this year, Mendonca was President of OMD EMEA, were she was responsible for the financial and operational performance of all OMD offices across Europe, Middle East and Africa.
She’s seeing a “burgeoning interest” in tailor-made, bespoke programmatic solutions as Accenture helps its clients procure the right marketing technology and develop the most appropriate marketing stack. “That is where the sort of sweet spot of the need is at the moment. And of course being a technology powerhouse we have a lot of skills when it comes to systems integration,” Mendonca says.
Over time, Accenture will build out “more of an orchestration of a suite of technology” tailored to specific clients and be able to “develop something a little bit more industrialized for those clients who really want a global marketing activation to run on their behalf.”
Asked about flaws in the digital media ecosystem, Mendonca believes that it needs more “governance” and that Accenture will be helping clients gain added transparency “to basically increase the power and potency of the working media.”
Given Accenture’s “myriad number of C-Suite client relationships,” she sees the company providing agnostic advice on data-directed marketing activation. “Because this is the first time where we really do have the ability to see proper marketing ROI on every single dollar spent. So giving that that clarity and transparency to clients is very, very important.”
