2022 was a big year for Accenture’s marketing and CX services arm. In April, it rebranded what used to be known as Accenture Interactive under CEO David Droga as Accenture Song, a name that Droga said “conveys an enduring and universal form of human craft, connection, inspiration, and experience.” More practically, Song harmonised its 40+ acquisitions to all sing from the same score sheet under its new brand. 

The chorus of Droga’s new Song is built around ‘life centricity’, a vision for brands to not just digitally transform to help consumers but to understand people’s complex lives and help them live it better. In Japan, Song put it into play with personalised digital services for a cosmetics major. For Singapore’s Changi Airport, it’s building new service touchpoints for travellers and a new loyalty scheme that cuts across channels. 

The vision is nice and there’s business growth behind it to back it up. Accenture Song grew headcount and revenue significantly, including through new acquisitions, while signalling it wants to invest further in Southeast Asia.  

Category 2022 2021 Business B+   B Innovation B B+ DEI and sustainability B B- Creativity and effectiveness B- B- Management B B *2021 scores adjusted to new numeric scale. Read about the grading methodology

Business (B+)

Accenture Song continues to be one of the fastest growing brand experience consultancies, growing its revenue globally from $12.5 billion in 2021 to $16 billion in 2022 through both organic growth and acquisition. Although the APAC slice of those revenues is still thin by comparison, they're growing by strong double-digits at a faster pace than the global average and quicker than most agencies in this analysis. Song’s profitability also aligns with Accenture’s healthy global profit picture.   

On the acquisition side, Song acquired Indonesian digital agency Romp in August with its 150 employees in Jakarta to extend its creative reach in Southeast Asia. Later, in December, it added customer research advisory Fiftyfive5 with a staff of 200 across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. On the organic side, where Song says it generates 90% of its revenue growth, the hottest business areas have focused on commerce, marketing transformation and new product creation. 

Song has the enormous advantage in that it continually spawns new business from large existing clients and clients of its consulting parent company: one Asian conglomerate working with Accenture in the property space needed Song to reimagine its airline’s inflight commerce experience; an insurance major needed a new social media solution to connect agents with clients; Japan’s Tokyu Land needed to transform its digital modelling for consumers, while Thai developer MQDC needed a new metaverse experience for prospective buyers. With Song, it’s difficult to separate ‘new business’ from ‘client business.’ 

No wonder Song’s confidential client list in APAC reads like a definitive list of top companies in every sector. Song now works with every top 10 global pharma company, every top 10 global consumer goods company and 9 of the top 10 telecom, automotive, banking and retail companies. It still faces the same economic headwinds and market-specific challenges (as did in China last year) as its competitors, but no agency holding company has such a client portfolio advantage. Song, however, will point out that its creative agencies, like The Monkeys also bring in client CX work (as with Qantas). 

A smaller minority of Song’s business comes from winning brand marketing pitches against agencies, so you won’t find them high up in the new business league tables. But the pace at which they take on new work is far ahead of the pack. 

Innovation (B)

As we pointed out last year, designing innovative solutions to solve complex client challenges is core to Accenture's offering. While some of the new remit examples described above attest to this, our limited view of client work in 2022 doesn’t include as many impressive examples of utterly transformational brand work. 

New tools and strategies were developed like a new content relevance tool in Greater China that helps benchmark content effectiveness and consumer behaviour in real-time. A new AI tool was employed for a retail client to speed up creative production and there was plenty of work with tech companies to create data management platforms and automated marketing systems.  

More sexy was the metaverse in 2022, which also was a key focus for Song. It launched the Accenture Metaverse Continuum for business groups, had 40 global client metaverse engagements and tried out new experiences in Accenture’s own Nth Floor space in the metaverse (see video below). 

Song also actively fosters innovative thinking among its people and clients through initiatives like Rogue Bees, Song’s connected community for discovery and exploration, its APAC Fintech Innovation Lab or its Next-Gen CMO quarterly workshops in Japan.  

In short, Accenture Song remains a ‘very good’ destination for innovation. Its grade is pulled back a notch this year as the scope of innovative work for clients in 2022 appears less game-changing than in past years. 

DEI & Sustainability (B)

Accenture wants to be the most inclusive and diverse company in the world and the scale of its global championing and support networks for cross-cultures, LGBTQA+ allies, persons with disabilities and training on mental health and unconscious bias is impressive.  In APAC, however, we previously pointed out that DEI was not a strong suit for Accenture Interactive (Song’s predecessor) with lower female staff and leadership levels and inconsistent DEI programmes across markets.  

While Song still trails agencies on gender balance (six of 16 APAC leads are women), the number of female staff and women leaders rose in 2022 and we saw a wide variety of gender-related advocacy, support and mentorship programmes in most markets. Among the initiatives to foster inclusion: Japan runs a ‘PwD Voice’ blog and annual events to educate staff by those with disabilities; Song raised funds for cerebral palsy in ANZ and held neurodiversity talks; China celebrates Pink Fridays with LGBTQA+ sharing sessions, ethnic minority cultural events are held in all markets. The effort is good, but what we like best are the hard actions (not for publication) to enshrine equality with regards to benefits in all markets where legally possible. 

Mental health awareness has been supported with tools and resources at the Accenture and Song levels, from physical health and mindfulness sessions to conferences and workshops through SEA with the active participation of Song’s leadership. 

On sustainability, Accenture has kept its environmental targets (net zero emissions and zero waste by 2025, 100% renewable electricity in 2023), but we don’t see how much progress has been made toward them internally. 

We like the creation of Song’s Sustainability Studio, whose mandate is to challenge, train and create new impactful products and services for colleagues and clients. Song’s client work is likely where it can make the most impact. This can be seen in its environmental education programs for a Japanese telco, its electric vehicle charging sites for a leading resource company and its metaverse work for Tuvalu (see below).  

We’re lifting the grade to ‘very good’ this year, based largely on the improvements in DEI programmes.  

Creativity & Effectiveness (B-)

In the last couple of years, Accenture has tripled its creative talent by investing in Japan (Droga5), New Zealand (The Monkeys), Malaysia (Entropia) and Indonesia (Romp), while bringing in feted creative Tara Ford (Campaign’s Women Leading Change 2022 ‘Creative Captain’) to lead The Monkeys. Last year, it notably hired Johnny Tan, formerly of 72andSunny, to be the first creative chief for Southeast Asia and Song’s global Creative Council began hosting more learning sessions at APAC-friendly times.  

It’s definite progress, reflected in a larger award haul in 2022, including 17 Spikes, several Effies and a greater number of local awards. The Monkey’s Make Lamb, Not Walls campaign managed to win a Spikes Grand Prix in both 2022 (Strategy & Effectiveness) and 2023 (Creative Effectiveness) while it’s work in 2022 to create the world’s first digital nation in the metaverse to preserve the disappearing Pacific Island country of Tuvalu won a double Spikes Grand Prix in 2023 (PR and Digital Craft), making The Monkeys Australia’s agency of the year.  

Good job Monkeys, you’ve done your heavy lifting. Given the creative investments being made through the region it’s only a matter of time before we see top creative work flourish more widely. We also recognise that Song’s transformative work is different, with bigger impact potential than beautifully crafted but fleeting marketing campaigns. Its work extending the capabilities of Robinhood, a Thai food delivery app, into a super app that can support hundreds of thousands of local businesses, is one example; the launch of a new D2C app for NipponHam Group to communicate and sell directly to Japanese consumers is another. It's close, but we’re keeping the grade here at ‘good’ just because Song’s entire body of creativity and effectiveness doesn’t quite match that of other agencies earning a ‘very good’ B grade.

Management (B)

Each year Accenture has listed more members of its APAC leadership team (now at 16). To the cynical, this helps to detract from the male-heavy lineup of key market leads, but Song insists it’s an intentional change to keep up with its evolving and expanded capabilities. With solid business numbers behind them, the leaders kept Accenture Song squarely in growth mode that saw headcount jump by roughly 50% last year.   

Acquisitions counted for less than half of these gains, amounting to several hundred new hires in the region this past year but the rest were through organic growth. Some notable hires included luring RGA APAC leader Tuomas Peltoniemi to be its SEA client lead, bringing on Hakuhodo Kettle CEO Ikuko Ohta to be its experience and sustainability lead in Japan and Salesforce’s Brett Raven to lead growth markets experience platforms.  

This necessitated a greater focus on training and career development, with many more employee hours spent on courses and a new Career Explorer tool employed. The first personal growth training workshops were piloted in Southeast Asia, while in Japan, Song ramped up its software certification to hundreds of more staff. These moves, along with leadership incentives to lower attrition, are credited with helping Song substantially lower what was already among the lowest turnover rates in the business (it’s a shame we can’t publish it).  

Accenture’s brand and pocketbook also surely help in this regard, as the company isn’t known for its creative culture. But Song is starting to change that, with its ‘Song Strong’ sharing of playlists, designs and career stories, its SEA social squad of volunteers to bring the region together, or its Song Awards in Japan that celebrates unique talents. While The Monkeys have always fared well at the Campaign Agency of the Year awards, in 2022 it was Accenture Song’s Japan team that won big with three golds, a silver and five people awards.  

With solid results and no big missteps, management again earns a ‘very good’ grade of B. They will need to be more active in broader industry initiatives and better reflect the diversity of APAC’s local markets to improve it.

Marketing Commerce Growth & product innovation Sales & service *The agency provided a % breakdown but did not consent to its publication.  Growth & Product Innovation Sales & Service Commerce AIA Insurance (Greater China)  Conglomerate (Greater China)  Consumer electronics (ANZ)  Financial services (Thailand)  Government entity (ANZ)  Government entity (Singapore)  Retail (Japan) Retail (Japan)  Tech (Greater China)  Telecom (Japan) *Accenture Song did not consent to publish client names. Those identified here by Campaign have already had their client relationship with Accenture Song published publicly. A+: It’s a massive undertaking to change a company of our scale. We’re our best credentials – our transformation and phenomenal growth in just 12 months speak volumes of our evolved operating model, world-class talent and end-to-end capabilities to create new pathways to growth for our clients. 2022 was truly our year, our new melody.