The crossover between management consultancy and marketing has accelerated with news in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post that creative advertising agency Rothco had been bought by Accenture.
Rothco has been a major player in sport having been the creative agency behind AIB’s ‘The Toughest’ and ‘Road to Croker’ campaigns as well as overseeing Liberty Insurance’s partnership creative with the All Ireland Hurling and Camogie Championships over four years and Heineken’s creative campaigns around rugby.
The agency employs 160 people in Dublin and will now be folded into the Accenture team that employs 2,500 across a wide range of services covering traditional management consultancy areas in banking, IT and financial services through to an increasingly strong position in data analytics, digital marketing and more.
Accenture has been building a strong position within sport as well.
It has served as Official Technology Partner to the Nat West Six Nations in each of the past six years, a relationship that has seen the brand rolling out into consumer profile through providing official statistics for BBC and RTÉ coverage of the tournament and in the provision of official tournament statistics to all media.
Earlier this year the global brand signed a multi-year deal to take on the same role with the Golden State Warriors in the NBA.
It has also been a long-term partner of the Australian Rugby Union providing analysis of data drawn from a reported 9,000 data points within the way the sport is played.
Making data more easily understood and accessible has been a driver of the companies association with sport. Taking on a digital-driven advertising agency with a tradition of similar storytelling through the medium of sporting performance and engagement makes a lot of sense.
Accenture opened a major content studio in New York in 2016 and spoke at the time of doing a similar exercise in six other locations around the world, with at least one of those in Europe.
The strong position of Dublin within Accenture, hosting the European Data Analytics Hub and The Dock facility, allied to the news of this purchase of Rothco, suggests that Dublin will be favourite to become one of those centres.
The hope will be then that sport will continue to play a significant role in the development of Accenture’s digital transformation.
