The Monkeys (left to right): Neysan Zölzer (design director), Ray Chan (digital architecture lead), Damon Stapleton (chief creative officer), Storm Day (chief business officer), Nimesh Amin (head of transformation), Justin Mowday (CEO), Tom Sykes (head of strategy), Edwin Rozells (services lead).
“We don’t have a thing, buddy, we’ve got zilch.”
These were Justin Mowday’s words two years ago when he confirmed he was ditching his cushy job at DDB to join a consulting firm that had no creative advertising presence in the local market. In a frank admission, he conceded he wasn’t sure what he was thinking giving up a team of 270 people and a flash building shared with Aston Martin and Lamborghini to “potentially sit in a garage” somewhere with long-time collaborator Damon Stapleton.
Fast-forward to 2023 and you’d need quite a substantial garage to house the team that Mowday, now chief executive of The Monkeys Aotearoa, and chief creative officer Stapleton have built.
“We’ve got 72 people at the moment,” says Mowday, suggesting the Accenture-owned company has moved on quite quickly from the early press image of two shaggy-haired creative types gambling their entire careers on a concept untested in the local market.
“We’re growing fast and we’ve got roles in the market at the moment. Our growth would only be constrained by our ability to get the right people fast enough.”
New Zealand isn’t the first market where Accenture has established a creative presence, with the organisation snapping up dozens of businesses around the world to build its creative clout. The Monkeys, Rothco, Droga5 and Bow & Arrow are just some of the companies acquired. This acquisition strategy has taken the consulting giant on a global journey stretching from Brazil (New Content) to the Netherlands (Storm Digital), China (HO Communication) and Australia (The Monkeys) since 2015.
All these agencies feed into Accenture Song (previously Accenture Interactive), which is now promoted as the largest digital creative agency in the world. The scale of this shift should not be underestimated, given this arm of Accenture was only established in 2009. In the space of just over a decade, they built a force – albeit through aggressive acquisition – now going to toe-to-toe with the four horsemen of advertising: holding companies WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe and Interpublic.
But Accenture’s New Zealand strategy is discrete from this global colonisation of advertising firms. Rather than just buying an established firm and waiting for the eventual departure of executives who had cashed in on years of hard work, Accenture plucked out two of the most well-regarded people in the local industry and gave them a blank canvas.
“There wasn’t a handbook to follow,” says Mowday. “It wasn’t like: ‘Here’s how you do it’. And there wasn’t even complete clarity on what the offer [was]. That’s been pretty amazing, because there aren’t many times in your career that you get a chance to do that.”
While Accenture didn’t necessarily buy a full agency, Mowday believes the company was investing in attributes that contributed to the most successful modern advertising agencies.
“They’ve seen enough evidence that the combination of creativity and technology fused together was gaining some traction – and they were actually thinking about the experiences people have across all areas,” says Mowday.
It wasn’t long ago that advertising executives scoffed at the idea of management and accounting consultants moving into the creative advertising space. The common refrain was that consultants don’t know how to do creative and creative people don’t want to work for consultants.
These days, there are few agencies in town that would want to see The Monkeys’ moniker on a pitch list. ASB, Fonterra, Meridian, Southern Cross and Mazda are just some of the clients the agency has already picked up. And it turns out Mowday and Stapleton are quickly also learning a few tricks from the consultants, who have long relied on project work to keep the balance sheet ticking along.
“Unlike the traditional agency business that I came from, we are much more comfortable with projects,” says Mowday.
“We have a mix of these deep ongoing engagements, but also like 50 other projects across the year ... Some of them might be a 12-week project and you’re in and out. Some of them might be a project that leads to a project that leads to a project. And some of them, like ASB, Fonterra or Meridian, are really deep ongoing relationships.”
The one common criticism directed at The Monkeys is that Mowday and Stapleton have simply made another ad agency and it doesn’t really change the landscape beyond adding another name to those already fighting for a slice of the pie.
Mowday was expecting this question, and his response catches me off guard.
“We have created an ad agency,” says Mowday, with a grin hinting there’s more to it than that.
It occurs to me then that Mowday and Stapleton have been quite deliberate in the set-up of the interview for this chat. Sitting in the main meeting room at the Britomart office, the wide boardroom is surrounded by a diverse group of staff with skills that stretch well beyond advertising. The intention here is clearly to show that Accenture stretches deeper into business than any ad agency can.
While most ad agencies around town these days talk about how they’re advising their clients on strategy and starting to behave more like consultants, they’re most often restricted to marketing and communications. Their influence is generally stuck on the periphery, limited to advising on creative ideas to fit into marketing budgets defined long before they stepped into the room.
“When you’re pigeonholed to one slice of the pie, you start to get frustrated and push up against those barriers – and I think that’s where Damon and I were,” says Mowday.
“Most agencies have really good people and some exceptional people. You can always find a handful of people in most advertising agencies that are f***ing great, but they’re contained. They’re only allowed to play in this little bit of the sandpit.”
Tom Sykes, head of the strategy at The Monkeys, steps into the conversation at this point and explains the value of having a glimpse at the business sitting behind the marketing budget.
“The more time you spend at the customer coalface, really figuring out what they want, the more you realise that the products and services that you represent aren’t perfect,” says Sykes.
“But as the ad agency, you can’t touch the product, the service, the process, the system or the thing behind it. The commercial cycle then becomes a situation where you’re forced to make ads for products you know don’t quite live up to what people want. We’re now on a different cycle, where we can go further upstream, make better products and services and then go advertise them.”
Those are certainly bold words from a group of people who know better than most how to sell something to their audience. But what is it that actually makes The Monkeys – or Accenture Song, for that matter – any different from myriad agencies all promising to give their clients the best strategic advice since the Almighty dropped the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai for Moses?
Sykes says ad agencies aren’t fooling anyone by selling the promise of a broader business strategy when everyone in the room knows that’s not what they do.
“If your bread and butter is communications, then to suddenly become an expert in something like after-sales or logistics is really hard to build from scratch,” he says. “But when you’ve got 700,000 people sitting behind you in a consultancy, then you can open that up.”
The point he’s making here is that The Monkeys don’t have to sell the story that they have the answer to every business problem. They know they don’t and that doesn’t matter. What they have instead is an enormous global team of management consultants who have previously advised clients in other markets on issues that might only be emerging locally in 2023.
To put this into context, Accenture has a so-called Centre of Excellence in Dubai, which stores a thorough catalogue of all the work the company has done in various markets. They’re free to call the team in this arm of the business at any stage to get information relevant to a project they’re working on.
Stapleton has a slightly more colourful way to describe this dynamic: “We’re trying to write new books, but we also have a huge f***ing library.”
The Monkeys tap into that library by inviting Accenture workers into pitches and having them share a first-hand account of a similar project they’ve worked on in another market. Recently, when advising a client on their banking app, The Monkeys were able to bring in a team from Japan who had previously built something similar from scratch within four months.
“Think about that from the client’s perspective,” says Stapleton. “When we say, ‘We can do it, we’ve done it before and these are the people that did it. You can talk to them’, it becomes a different kind of conversation.”.
Mowday says the key advantage Accenture affords to The Monkeys is credibility. In the risk-averse world of modern business, the track record of Accenture can go a long way toward winning the trust of an executive who might not always be willing to listen to what the often-disparaged “colouring-in department” has to say.
Mowday says he’s already seen this play out in work The Monkeys are doing with the executive team at Southern Cross Healthcare.
“[We’re] partnering with them on their 10-year growth strategy,” says Mowday. “This has included refining Southern Cross Healthcare’s purpose and vision, informing multiple workstreams from people engagement to transformation to technology enablement and beyond.”
He rattles off another example of redesigning the ASB app, which has become the centre of the banking experience for every customer.
“This involves multiple Accenture Song and Monkeys disciplines coming together across brand, design, technology, product, growth and go-to-market and working side-by-side with ASB as a single team to deliver business and customer outcomes.”
In The Big Con, published in 2023, economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington warn that the biggest consulting companies in the world weaken our businesses, infantilise our governments and warp our governments. They are especially concerned about these companies acting as advisers, legitimators and outsourcers – a trick only possible because of their enormous networks, contacts and global footprints.
With communications now added to the mix at consulting giants like Accenture and Deloitte, they are in the position of not only advising on strategy but also bringing that to life. So, is this dangerous, or is continuous consolidation just a byproduct of late-stage capitalism, which makes it increasingly difficult for the smaller guy to compete?
Mowday is measured in his response to this question.
“I have in the past seen executive teams outsourcing their five-year strategic plan to McKinsey or Bain or the equivalent,” he says.
“And in those cases, I think it’s a crying shame. I wonder what that executive team are actually doing if they’re not charting their own future. We tend to operate much more in the technology space, as a general rule. And in that space, more often than not, we’re co-locating with the client. We’re in the project together, solving specific problems. It’s not about us doing it. It’s about new blended teams coming together. And again, it’s a very different way of working for Damon and me, or your typical ad agency people.
“We’ve got 72 people, but probably 25 to 30 of them are actually on-site at the client’s place in blended teams working in an agile way with that client. I just don’t think it works for a consultancy to come in and take over a project. I think it works when we blend and work with them.”
Despite this, consultancies, particularly the Big Four, have been lambasted in the media in recent months, mainly off the back of lucrative Government contracts associated with major policy moves. Mowday says that criticism is to be expected, but he stops short of hammering the Government for spending on these companies.
“Once every 10 or maybe even once every 100 years, you’re going to look at reforming a part of the infrastructure in New Zealand or the way a Government department works, and it’s only natural that you won’t have the muscle to do it by yourself,” he says.
“There’s a legitimate reason to bring in any of the consultancies that have deep expertise, so they can enable you to do that task. Has it spiralled out of control and gone too far? I don’t know. But you can’t expect a company or government to have every skillset in-house all the time.”
As I pack up my notepad and get ready to depart, Stapleton accompanies me out of the boardroom. It’s only then that it occurs to me how laconic the usually chatty chief creative officer has been throughout this meeting.
He quietly confides in me that there were moments when he felt overwhelmed by the task at hand - and that he also had to retrain and upskill in certain areas just to be able to do the job as well as required. Then, as if requesting an important favour, he asks if I have a moment to look at something.
He disappears into a side room, which could have been a bathroom cubicle for all I know, and emerges with a laptop. There, in the stairwell, he taps the keyboard, imploring it to load a bit faster (he knows I have a train to catch). A moment later, his eyebrow rises and his face softens into a smile.
“Check this out,” he says.
It’s a video explaining the backstory of Benee’s new track Bagels, which was specifically developed in conjunction with AUT neuroscientists to help ease anxiety.
A week later, this song would be everywhere: from Spotify playlists to billboards to New Zealand news sites and even in Rolling Stone magazine.
It’s a reminder that for all the talk about consultancies, structures and ad agency models, the one thing that still counts more than anything else is a good idea shared in a stairwell.
Damien Venuto is an Auckland-based journalist with a background in business reporting who joined the Herald in 2017. He is currently the host of The Front Page podcast and also writes columns and articles, often focused on the intersections between business and creativity.
The event is described as a series of aggressive sales pitches.