CANNES – If you needed any indication that the big consulting firms were making an entry in the world of advertising services, look back to Accenture’s appointment of Omnicom veteran Nikki Mendonça in October 2017.
With the group for 16 years, Mendonça had been president of OMD Worldwide’s EMEA region, responsible for 6,500 marketers running brands like McDonald’s and PepsiCo.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mendonça, now president of Accenture Interactive Operations, says the pace of change is still accelerating.
“The ability to sort of integrate the big desire brand building and the personalization … I think a lot of advertisers are asking us that they want to do both,” she observes.
“As more and more (media) touch points (become) shoppable, it’s incredibly important that I take some of their expertise and being able to almost truncate that purchase funnel so that you’ve literally got desire building, demand generation, and conversion happening in a matter of minutes – for example, on the Instagram platform. There’s a lot of interest around that.”
Mendonça is talking about the emergence of features inside many media channels that don’t just support the delivery of messaging that could spark purchase consideration later down the line, they also enable that purchase to be completed there and then.
That is increasingly the case with some interactive TV ads, and it is the case inside Instagram photos as of 2019.
And, by the sounds of it, this isn’t just a theory. Speaking with MTM’s Jon Watts at Cannes, Mendonça says brands are all over the opportunity.
“A plethora of advertisers are all searching for a new model,” she adds. “I didn’t think that the sort of groundswell of interest would be that intense.
“The moment we went out to market, the moment we said that we were in the business of activation and experience activation, then a lot of clients started calling. So now I’m really trying to build a global offering to keep up with that demand.”
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