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Consulting firms emerged as the largest recruiters in the top B-schools of India 
 
At IIM-A, McKinsey &amp; Co made the highest number of offers in the consulting domain, — 15. Also in the fray at IIM-A were Accenture Strategy, Bain &amp; Co. and BCG. 
 At IIM Bangalore, the Boston Consulting Group led with 20 offers followed by Accenture Strategy (14), McKinsey &amp; Co (13), <keyword id="122749" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Bain-Company">Bain &amp; Company</keyword> (10), <keyword id="6358918" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Deloitte">Deloitte</keyword> (10) and AT Kearney (9). Thirty per cent of the entire batch received offers in the broadly defined consulting sector. Apart from the well-known names, other reputed consultancies such as EXL Consulting (10), Alvarez &amp; Marsal (5), <keyword id="554999" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Roland-Berger">Roland Berger</keyword> (4) and Strategy&amp; (3) picked up candidates from IIM-B. 
 Other prominent recruiters in the consulting space were <keyword id="50041" type="CITY" weightage="20" keywordseo="KPMG">KPMG</keyword> (7), <keyword id="66728" type="CITY" weightage="20" keywordseo="PricewaterhouseCoopers">PricewaterhouseCoopers</keyword> (5), Nomura Research Institute (2), PwC Diamond Consulting (2) and <keyword id="85953" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Ernst-Young">Ernst &amp; Young</keyword> (1). 
 
At SPJIMR, consulting was not far behind as 27 per cent of the class of 2017 secured offers from top consulting firms, similar to the last year. The recruiters included Accenture Strategy, GEP, Deloitte, IMS, PwC, KPMG, Avalon Consulting, among others. The profiles offered were strategic consulting, operations consulting, financial advisory and IT consulting. There were also five international consulting offers. 
 At IIM Trichy, one of the newer IIMs, consulting and analytics firms picked up 29 per cent of the students, with BFSI second at 22 per cent. The highest salary offered for a consulting job was ₹19 lakh and the recruiters were <keyword id="28721" type="CITY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Cognizant">Cognizant</keyword>, Deloitte and <keyword id="4231233" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="publicis-sapient">Publicis Sapient</keyword>, among others.

Consulting firms emerged as the most aggressive recruiters in hiring from Top B-schools this placement season

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">AccentureBrian Whipple, head of Accenture Interactive</div></div></div>Management consulting firm Accenture announced it had acquired UK <keyword id="35666" type="COMPANY" weightage="100" keywordseo="advertising">advertising</keyword> agency Karmarama on Tuesday.Speaking to Business Insider, David Whipple, who heads the Accenture Interactive unit - <a href="https://www.accenture.com/us-en/accenture-interactive-named-worlds-biggest-fastest-growing">which was named by AdAge as the world's biggest and fastest growing digital agency network in 2016</a> - said Karmarama will help set it apart from competitors like IBM, Deloitte, and the services offered by advertising holding companies. Now Accenture can help design customer experiences, build them, run them, and have an agency to lead on creative.Karmarama works with clients including the BBC, Honda, and Unilever and is one of the UK's biggest independent creative agencies.Jon Wilkins, who is Karmarama's executive chairman and will take on an additional leadership role within Accenture Interactive following the acquisition, told Business Insider he never wanted to sell the business to a classic advertising holding company where all the benefits of its independence could be stifled. By contrast, he described Accenture Interactive as one of the most "entrepreneurially minded businesses" he had come across.This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Business Insider's Lara O'Reilly: What was the appeal of Karmarama to Accenture?Brian Whipple (Accenture): We are laser-focused on helping clients create the best customer experiences on the planet.While we are in that today, having Jon's team as part of the family vastly increase our ability to do that in the bleeding edge and I look forward to tapping the team across a network of opportunities.[Karamarama is a] media agnostic, technology agnostic, experience-first philosophy agency concept. Technology, commerce, content management, and advertising are all about enabling the new customer experience not leading with [a specific media].O'Reilly: Management consulting firms tend to be client focused, whereas creative agencies - arguably - have more of a focus on the consumer. Will this acquisition help you on that front too?Whipple: Accenture Interactive is specifically focused on the interaction between the client and the end consumer, and not on clients per se. So that may be different from your consulting firm description. Accenture is in no part a consulting firm - our parent entity is, but that is not what the Accenture Interactive business model or culture is.We are focused on bringing brand promise to life through the customer experience.Jon Wilkins (Karmarama): An interesting find for us that we have detected from consumer point of view and the CMO point of view is the desire to create one connected experience. If you look at the way CMOs' careers are evolving, the ones that have reached the pinnacle are those that have created a system to connect tech and digital experience with the brand and we think that is the battlegroundFrom a consumer perspective, it's the current weak link. A project Karmarama has been doing, <a href="http://www.project-reconnect.com/">Project Reconnect, which is championed WFA (World Federation of Advertisers)</a>, looks at the long term trends of brand awareness, engagement, and trust. All those metrics show a decline in brands' ability to truly connect. The number one issue is a lack of connection in digital experience and brandWe see bleeding edge demands being placed on the CMO by consumers who are now voting with ad blockers and other avoidance techniques to demand more from brands and CMOsO'Reilly: Independent creative agencies are usually favored by clients for exactly that: their independence. When independent agencies get bought, they can sometimes lose some of the magic and some of the risk-taking they were afforded by being independents. Is that received wisdom true? How are you going to prevent that from happening?Wilkins (Karmarama): I think it can be true - definitely if we had gone into a classic marketing services holding company, there are two things that tend to happen.One: Management have selfish endeavors around their earn-out that forces them to become, maybe, greedy. And also they tend to work in silos and that can lead to a lack of entrepreneurialism.These are things we didn't want to happen to our brand.Within Accenture, we are very much agnostic, as Brian said. I think we can challenge ourselves to continually strive to bring new exciting ways to communicate with customers on behalf of CMOs.I don't think I've ever come across a more entrepreneurially-minded business than Accenture Interactive. When it comes to identifying business growth opportunities, they are different to the classic holding company.Whipple (Accenture): Our bread and butter business is less about responding to client RFPs (requests for proposals) or AOR (agency of record) pitches. I'm not saying we don't do that but the real play for us is bringing new business models entirely, new revenue streams entirely to our Fortune 2,000 clients.It's less about will they go with us versus agency X or Y and more about will they partner with us to create this new business.Wilkins (Karmarama): Accenture Interactive is very entrepreneurial and we found this very exciting.As an independent you can't do, however ambitious you are, you don't have logistics, scale, and breadth of business to go to these companies and help them grow their business.We think we are going to be more entrepreneurial with Accenture Interactive. We are not just batting for ourselves: it's a bigger market opportunity.O'Reilly: Accenture Interactive acquired design agency Fjord in 2013, which seems like a similar deal in terms of bringing on board new creative expertise. How has the integration gone and how to you bring Fjord to the table when you are speaking to clients?Whipple (Accenture): The Fjord deal has been amongst the most visible and most successful in Accenture Interactive's history. We are fortunate to have a strong track record amongst most or all of our acquisitions and Fjord is at the top of that. Fjord is top of mind for our executives across the globe, and it has opened up major service design capabilities in Sao Paulo, Sydney Australia, and all major markets in Western Europe and North America.Adding Karmarama from creative standpoint will only bolster that, and sit side by side from a service design perspective.We have an Accenture Interactive team that has deep tentacles reaching into the technology capabilities of Accenture to shepherd creative talent and that's critical.We are not just another player in this ecosystem. We didn't buy Karmarama to take their earnings and distribute them to shareholders - it's about creating synergy for clients. Conceptually, this is the same play [as Fjord.]O'Reilly: From the outside looking in, there now seems to be lots of entities offering a similar type of service. There's Accenture Interactive, <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/ibm-quietly-built-the-worlds-largest-digital-agency-heres-how-it-got-there-2016-3">IBM's huge iX digital agency</a>, and Deloitte Digital and its acquisition of creative agency Heat. Then on the holding company side, you have <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/interview-with-maurice-lvy-at-ad-week-europe-2015-3">Publicis Groupe acquiring Sapient and reorganizing to offer clients "digital transformation" services</a> and WPP reorganizing its businesses around a concept called "horizontality," where clients can take a mixture of digital, data and creative services. What makes you different?Whipple (Accenture): It's a fair question and I would propose to you that they are very dissimilar things.For starters, a number of the companies you mentioned, which are all well run, strong organizations are essentially a collection of different agencies. Yes, there are press releases about grouping them together, but they are a founder-based culture, so their go to market strategy is different.I have one global management team and we go to market as Accenture Interactive. It may be that Fjord offers service design and Karmarama is in a similar brand space, but the Accenture Interactive team all has 100% aligned incentives, without separate founder incentives at all.What's also completely different is that while we are about designing customer experiences, we are also equal parts about running, enabling, and managing these customer experiences for clients.It's not just abut building it and turning it over to them, it's often about running the assets and technology, where we would have a relationship with clients that would probably be 10-20x in size of what a traditional player would have. It's a multi-year, retention-based relationship partner model.O'Reilly: But isn't that what iX and Deloitte offer?Whipple (Accenture): I don't comment on competitors usually.iX is largely a piece of front-end design born through the web sphere of tech. Deloitte is also a strong firm but does not have nearly the global reach of Accenture Interactive, nor specifically the footprint that Accenture Interactive has in the share of mind with CEOs, and CIOs, and now CMOs.I'll give you an example. When you get in the client room and they say: We have to come up with a campaign and we have to do that in an innovative way that attracts new customers and creates profitable relationships in lasting way and a new revenue stream for us.When that happens, a number of providers all raise their hand and say: "We can do that for you, here are five ideas."Then the client says: "We need that done and implemented in this particular commerce tech, across the Adobe marketing stack, and executing with our back-end campaign systems." Then 15 or so arms in air go down to three very quickly.Then the client says: "And we need to version this in 20 languages, across 50 different countries."Most of the arms go down.Then the client says: "We need you to manage it for us because it's impossible for us to manage content and version content with software releases, government regulations, and privacy and permission restrictions."That, pretty much, is our business model.We lead with definition of customer experience but by the time you have multi-national complex management pursuits it takes world class organization like Accenture to pull that off for the clientO'Reilly: Jon, have you been shopping Karmarama around for a while and were there other suitors?Wilkins (Karamara): Amazingly, we haven't been shopping around for a while. But because we are quite big and independent, there has been a lot of independent interest.There was never any desire amongst management to sell the business. We are a pretty soft company with some really good values. The term management used is to "steer the ship in the best waters for future."It's another exciting journey for everyone involved. We told everyone today and people ar really excited and happy about the company.We would have never sold to a classic marketing services group. That had zero appeal amongst management and leadership here. This was an opportunity to really challenge the model. The whole agency model needs shaking up and this is it.O'Reilly: What do you mean by a "soft company"?Wilkins (Karmarama): This business has never been about commercial pursuit. A lot of my former colleagues and peers set up agencies with sole aim of exiting and making money.The thing that brought us together with Accenture Interactive was our cultural fit as over time we realized we share a lot of values: the way we treat staff, customers, the mark we want to leave on society. We have always had loftier maybe stranger pursuits.Visit Markets Insider for constantly updated market quotes for individual stocks, ETFs, indices, commodities and currencies traded around the world. <a href="http://markets.businessinsider.com/">Go Now!</a> <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/income-state-top-one-percent-salary-map-2016-11">Here's how much you need to make to be in the top 1% of every state</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="V0cW9zNzE6SM2p7WbrsEo0VKlNzdMDjq" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Accenture explains why it just bought ad agency Karmarama

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Jin S. Lee/Business Insider</div></div></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>Deloitte Digital's Andy Main argues that many advertiser needs are no longer met by legacy agency tactics.</li><li>Business Insider recently caught up with Main, Deloitte Digital's global head.</li><li>Main said agencies are at a disadvantage because they lack direct access to clients' c-suite and just transact in media.</li><li>Consulting companies have an edge because they can speak to all the areas that transform clients' business, he said.</li></ul>Consultancies including <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-would-never-see-the-worlds-largest-digital-ad-agency-making-ads-for-olive-garden-according-to-its-head-2018-3">Accenture Interactive</a> and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ix-global-chief-matt-candy-on-how-it-is-cutting-out-ad-agencies">IBM iX</a> often claim that they can meet the needs of CEOs and CMOs far better than traditional agencies can.Deloitte Digital is no different. The <keyword id="35666" type="COMPANY" weightage="100" keywordseo="advertising">advertising</keyword> wing of consulting giant Deloitte has no plans to launch a programmatic services unit as Accenture Interactive did, but says many advertisers' needs are no longer being met by legacy agency tactics."They [ad agencies] should be worried because the heritage of the agencies has been largely in the media business, and people nowadays are looking for more value than just transacting media," said Andy Main, head of Deloitte Digital. Business Insider caught up with Main last month for a chat. Here's an edited version of our conversation.Tanya Dua: Agencies are increasingly wary of Deloitte Digital, Accenture and IBM iX. Should they be?Andy Main: I would think so. The heritage of the agencies has been largely in the media business, and people nowadays are looking for more value than just transacting media. It's more about experience, technology, innovation and design coming together, which does require media, but media is not the central talking point.Dua: Consultancies say their relationships go all the way to the c-suite, in the board room. Is that another advantage that agencies lack?Main: Agencies have largely been built to talk to marketing. And it's really hard to change a business for the better only by talking to marketing. When was the last time an ad transformed a business? Probably never. You need to be more relevant to the future ambitions of businesses, which means you're going to talk to the c-suite.Dua: Accenture recently set up a programmatic arm. Will Deloitte Digital go down that route?Main: Programmatic is not the best use of marketing money. I may be lynched by the whole programmatic industry for saying that, but programmatic advertising is not exactly super targeted, because it's largely cookie-based retargeting based upon something that you might have already bought. Rather, you want to use data about your customer using AI and cognitive pattern recognition, to target people individually, with things you know they might need in their lives. I kind of equate programmatic to goldfish. It's not a precise communication. We've built a platform that enables that precision in communication.Dua: Can you give an example?Main: I'm not at liberty to give names. In retail, for consumer goods clients, we help in capturing first-party customer data and analyzing that in real-time to say something relevant to the customer at the point of touch and engagement they wish for - be it in digital or a store, a referral or recommendation.That covers the entire customer experience journey, because while the marketing industry's been more geared toward making me aware of something, it's not actually helping me use it or get value from my usage. Most of a person's experience with a brand is after they buy it. And we're helping brands capture and monetize these points of touch in addition to marketing.Dua: Sir Martin Sorrell's S4 is similar to Deloitte Digital and Accenture in that it has a single P&amp;L right?Main: We take it as a great compliment. I think the jury's out, because S4 is clearly a brand-new entity. I wish it well and hope it's massively successful, but it doesn't have the embedded client base or relationships in the marketplace. So it's got a big fight in its hands to establish its position as a brand new business.Dua: What about the holding companies - will all the mergers and consolidation help them survive?Main: If you look at the growth and the shareholder value return from the holding companies compared to non-holding companies, you see a huge gap. Recently, there have been improvements, but you've got to ask if everyone else is growing double digits, ourselves included. What's happening to the holding companies that prohibits their growth? It's all the same market, and it all comes back to the focus on media.Dua: Talk about how Heat functions within Deloitte Digital. Does it get pulled into these c-suite meetings?Main: Heat obviously helps with typical marketing, original creative and messaging to the marketplace. But Deloitte Digital has also moved into the digital transformation business. Heat is extremely helpful in putting the story together about what the future of that business would be. But you can only do that if you've got the strategy, technology and design bits also figured out. Our business has all these bits glued together.Dua: What are some of the challenges you face? Is talent one of them?Main: We've seen a massive intake of talent from the typical holding company properties. Marketing is not the only outlet for creativity. We give people the ability to have creative expression across a business. The challenge is actually keeping up with the growth. Deloitte Digital has been around since 2012, and our share has been 30% CAGR year over year.Our ambition is to bring digital to all aspects of a business and not just creativity, experience and marketing, but AI, blockchain, biometrics, even things like space technology, which is also starting to come into our sphere of work. That's what our clients want to hear about to keep themselves at a continuous advantage.Dua: How do you respond to the criticism that consultancies don't actually produce any tangible work?Main: I'm in the business of transforming businesses, and that involves a higher-level relationship that pulls through the marketing and advertising work. So it's a view of the market that I see that they don't. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-news-sorting-170000-stories-2018-12">Microsoft News' corporate vice president explains how his team avoids fake news sorting through 170,000 stories a day</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

'When was the last time an ad transformed a business?': Deloitte Digital's Andy Main on why consultancies will prevail over ad agencies

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div><ul><li>Longtime Viacom marketing executive Ross Martin has launched a new consulting firm, Blackbird, designed to help companies answer existential questions and ultimately push into new businesses.</li><li>Blackbird is already working with 10 clients in several industries, including CNN.</li><li>Martin is also unveiling Lunch Partners, an investment firm aimed at helping marketing and <keyword id="6354777" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Media">media</keyword> executives support and nurture startups.</li></ul> A group of leaders in the media and <keyword id="35666" type="COMPANY" weightage="100" keywordseo="advertising">advertising</keyword> industry gathered recently to discuss how they could address the growing number of mass shootings in the US.As the meeting progressed, typical cause-driven ad ideas were bandied about. We could run a public-service TV campaign. Try to get a viral social-media initiative going. Or maybe persuade some pop-culture stars to speak out.Then Ross Martin, who had been mostly quiet during meeting, spoke up. "We need a physical museum," he said.His idea was a museum evoking a high school with lockers for every kid who has been killed in the US from gun violence. The hope was to make the issue of gun safety visceral for people, not unlike the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC.When Martin brought up the idea, "everyone just stopped," said Carolyn Everson, Facebook's global VP of marketing solutions. "We said, 'That's it.'"Everson had seen this before. She and Martin were colleagues at Viacom in the mid-2000s when Martin was known for his vision and his ability to execute big ideas in the confines of a giant organization."He has a brilliant creative mind," she told Business Insider. "I'd put him among the top three most creative people I've worked with. He'll be this quiet guy in a meeting, and then he'll have these mic-drop moments. I've seen it many times."Can being killer at brainstorming really turn into a business? Martin is betting he can channel his creative mind into two major endeavors. Since leaving Viacom earlier this year, after roughly 15 years at the media giant, Martin has spent the past several months birthing two lofty initiatives.<ul><li>He recently launched a brand-strategy consulting business, Blackbird, which has already pulled in nearly a dozen clients, including CNN, the Canadian studio <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/entertainment-one-rejects-itv-takeover-bid-eone-2016-8">Entertainment One</a>, and a biotech firm - in several industries in just five months.</li><li>Ross and his high-powered media friends are rolling out Lunch Partners, something of an alliance of industry executives interested in investing in and nurturing startups but who don't have the resources of a venture-capital firm.</li></ul><h2>BlackBird is not trying to be McKinsey, BBDO, or MediaLink</h2>It's Blackbird where Martin is trying to apply his blend of mic-drop ideas and business acumen. It may be easier to define what Blackbird aspires to be by looking at what it's not. According to Martin:<ul><li>It's not an ad agency that makes ads and buys media.</li><li>And it's a not a consulting firm that examines a business, find inefficiencies, and helps companies streamline processes and increase average revenue per user.</li><li>And it's not about networking and bridging connections.</li></ul>In other words, it's not McKinsey, it's not a giant creative agency like BBDO, and it's not MediaLink, known for its vast ad-industry networking chops.With Blackbird, which has 10 employees between New York and Los Angeles, Martin is trying to create a new lane in an industry crowded with service firms and consultants promising wisdom and sometimes a bit of secret magic - that of a strategic brand-consulting firm that helps companies figure out their ID.<h2>Companies have belief systems and operating systems - Blackbird will focus on the former</h2>As Martin laid out Blackbird's mission, he explained his theory that most companies have belief systems and operating systems. Operating systems are the processes by which they do things. In the case of a media company, it's how they distribute content and sell ads and attract audiences.Belief systems are tougher and get less attention, he says. And that's where Blackbird will come in. It will focus on high level strategy and business innovation - ideally with big giant companies that have lost their way and face disruptors, or the upstarts looking to do the disruption. Think packaged-goods giants facing direct-to-consumer brands born on the internet. Retailers battling Amazon. Car companies fighting Uber. TV companies battling mobile and streaming."Today, everybody's all up in everybody's grill," Martin told Business Insider. "For some people that's terrifying. For me that's super fun and exciting. Given the velocity of change in every industry, many brands and businesses have lost sight of true north, the why they need to exist. So they have an enormous difficulty unlocking growth.""If you don't know your role in the world, it makes it hard to figure out where you take the business," he said. The need for Blackbird's counsel has exceeded his expectations. Clients include the Canadian film and TV company <a href="https://www.entertainmentone.com/">Entertainment One</a>, the video tech firm MediaSilo, the Guggenheim, an architecture firm, an energy company, and even a PR giant."We are hearing from CEOs, CMOs, and boards," he said. "The phone calls we're getting are existential questions."<h2>It might sound like expensive therapy, but Blackbird's clients say it has value</h2>So how does Blackbird answer these questions? Well, it's early. So far, they'll spend weeks or months doing dozens of interviews with a client's leaderships and employees. They conduct detailed competitive research and compile as much data as they can. They'll put together a series of presentations, ideally coauthored by the client's themselves, aimed at helping a business get in touch with its true self.And then Blackbird's team might dig in and puts together a business plan, which might include new products or sectors the company should go after, or tweaks to a company's message or ways to extract value from certain assets.You might ask, isn't that just expensive therapy?Well, the current climate in many industries clearly creates an opportunity to promise immediate insight."Everyone's having to deal with uncertainty and chaos," said Lisa Shalett, former CMO at Goldman Sachs.That's undoubtedly true. But there's no shortage of independent experts-for-hire and consultants of all types offering instant solutions in nearly every industry. In the media and advertising sector alone, giants like <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/marketers-like-chipotle-are-hiring-consulting-firms-over-ad-agencies-2017-10">Deloitte and Accenture are charging hard into the space,</a>, bringing with them a track record of technology and data expertise - and a reputation for helping affect the bottom line.Martin's marketing background, and the focus on more amorphous value propositions like belief systems, could be a tougher sell for more highly challenged corporations.But Blackbird's early clients say not to underestimate Martin's operational expertise, and how all that heavy self-examination can help companies grow their business.For example, CNN is working with Blackbird on its two-year-old digital publication "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cnn-wants-to-turn-great-big-story-into-a-next-generation-tv-network-2017-6">Great Big Story</a>," which focuses on highlighting feel-good characters and awe-inspiring stories from around the world. After an extensive round of meetings and research, GBS tasked Blackbird with helping the publication figure out its next few moves as it expands the brand to become a next-generation cable network on the web."What Ross and the Blackbird team are building is unique in that they're able to take a specific business and brand challenge and offer creative solutions that are already road-tested," said Chris Berend, SVP of digital video at CNN. "He's already built about every kind of brand you can build, so his ideas feels less like consulting and more like a secret weapon."<h2>'We were headed into a massive period of transition'</h2>During more than a decade at Viacom, Martin helped forge new ground. For example, with Everson's help he helped birth <a href="http://blog.viacom.com/tag/scratch/">Scratch</a>, an in-house team that makes content for marketers.He ran programming at the college-aimed MTVu, then built out Viacom's well-regarded data-driven ad business and research division. By the end, as EVP of marketing strategy and engagement for Viacom Media Network, Martin was overseeing more than a dozen teams and worked closely with the C-suite and members of the Viacom board."I always got a new job that had never existed before, other than my first job selling women's shoes," he said.An example of the kind of work Martin shepherded: About four years ago, Snapple went to Viacom for help in rolling out Sun Drop, an older soda brand trying to reach at young consumers. <a href="http://blog.viacom.com/2012/03/ross-martin-reps-scratch-media-summit/">Viacom's Scratch team</a>, led by Martin, helped Snapple create a new character - the Sun Drop Girl - while conducting research on young consumers who could be used to target ad messages.That eventually led to Snapple doing more work on brands like Dr Pepper. "The meetings with [Viacom sales chief Sean Moran] and Ross, yes, they were trying to figure out how to add value to clients to get more ad revenue," said Jim Trebilcock, chief commercial officer for Dr Pepper Snapple Group. "But is was much more like, 'We have these proprietary assets - we have solutions that leveraged the insights we have here,' as opposed to 'Let's sell some ads.'"That's the kind of thinking that Martin wants to apply at Blackbird."We were headed into a massive period of transition," Martin said. "And we had to figure out how to use data science, tech, and creativity to create a new kind of future for the company. Now we as the legacy TV industry make better decisions. We are smarter.""I'm not a data scientist," he added. "I went to poetry school."<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div><h2>Believe it or not, successful media and marketing executives have trouble investing in other companies</h2>Meanwhile, outside of Blackbird, Martin is looking to steward Lunch Partners.Believe it or not, successful media and marketing executives have trouble investing in other companies. Yes, they get lots of opportunities, but don't have the kind of leverage or volume of deals or simply the ability to follow up on investments to get what they should out of the process, Martin says.So they need to join forces. Martin has recruited roughly a dozen executives across industries to pump money into startups - seed rounds or early A funding. The checks won't be huge (in the range of $150,000 to $250,000) but ideally the hands-on leadership and mentorship will be stronger than a typical VC."It's sort of the Avengers model of investing," said Nicholas Tran, head of brand culture at Samsung, who is part of Lunch Partners. "Today, we all get some limited deal flow and random ideas. You don't want to pass and you take a leap of faith. And the thing is, we're all still in the game."And their motivations are less about making a bet to get rich (not that anyone would turn that down). "I'm no stranger to investing, but to me, there is so much more than I can do besides write a check," said Shalett, who is joining Lunch Partners along with her husband, a financial-services veteran.Martin said they've already looked at 75 potential investment deals, and investing is about to start, with the firm looking at a customer-service startup founded by an ex-Google executive.If someone can actually fix customer service, that would be a serious mic drop.<div></div><div></div> <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-cure-bad-breath-dentist-tips-2016-12">The easiest way to get rid of bad breath - according to a dentist</a></h3> <div> </div> </div></hr>

'Everybody's all up in everybody's grill': A former Viacom exec is promising to help brands find their true identity in a time of chaos

iSpot.tvAdvertisers like Booking.com are relying less on agencies, and that should scare the ad business.A few years ago, <a href="https://www.booking.com/">Booking.com</a>, a hotel e-commerce site owned by Priceline, worked closely with a media-buying agency to figure out where to allocate its ad budgets."We'd have meetings where we'd sit down and say, 'We should put this much on YouTube, this much on other sites,' et cetera," Pepijn Rijvers, Booking.com's chief marketing officer, told Business Insider. "And then three months later we'd ask, 'How'd we do?'"But Booking.com is about to cut out that middleman, and it could have big implications for the advertising industry.This week, thousands of top executives from the media, advertising, and marketing industries will touch down in France for the annual Cannes ad festival. There, these bigwigs will receive awards and look to ink major ad deals. Yet hovering over the proceedings are questions about the future of the classic ad-agency business.In recent months, Booking.com has hired data scientists and researchers and other digital-media-buying experts. By the end of the year, all Booking.com's digital-media buying will be done in-house.According to Rijvers' there are two reasons for the change: speed and data. And the more outside companies involved, the more that structure gets in the way of adjusting digital ad campaigns on the fly, which ultimately costs the company money."I would not like to have meetings with long decks of data," Rijvers said, who recalled trying to set up "meetings with 30 people at agencies that take a week and a half to set up.""We have way more data than the media agency has. I'd make a very strong case that anything that generates data, you need to own as a business. You cannot have anyone else be the expert."Booking.com is representative of a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-marketers-want-more-ad-testing-less-debating-about-metrics-1491300000">new wave of marketers</a>. These are brands born with the internet, and they don't have decades of history running massive national television and magazine campaigns shepherded by traditional ad agencies. They don't rely on selling their goods at Walmart or Walgreens or the local car dealer. Instead, they have direct relationships with customers and live and die on data.That means they have a very different take on advertising than traditional marketers like Procter &amp; Gamble or General Motors, and that should scare the ad agency world.<h2>The pressure is mounting</h2>The ad industry loves its clichés. "Content is king." "Everyone's scared of Google and Facebook." "I'm a thought leader." And these days, everyone loves to repeat the line "The agencies are so screwed." Wikimedia CommonsPeople love to say that ad agencies are screwed.Though they usually use a different word at the end of that sentence.There's little doubt that traditional agencies - the companies that write and produce those brilliant Super Bowl ads and buy the media space to showcase their work - are under fire from several fronts.<ul><li>More marketers such as Booking.com are taking their data-driven, transaction-oriented ad buying (e.g., programmatic ads) in-house.</li><li>Some brands, like Chobani and Pepsi, are occasionally doing the same with their creative, or are <a href="https://tongal.com/">outsourcing the making of their ads to smaller upstarts</a>.</li><li>Consulting giants like <a href="http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/global-consultancies-are-buying-up-agencies-and-reshaping-the-brand-marketing-world/">Accenture and Deloitte are investing in the ad world</a>.</li><li>Facebook and Google are raking in a disproportionate amount of new ad spending, and both are building more agency-like functionality.</li><li>Companies like <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/vice-buzzfeed-tread-on-madison-avenues-turf-1466568065">Vice and BuzzFeed are making content for marketers</a> and distributing it.</li></ul><h2>'Agencies are said to be like cockroaches'</h2>Still, the agency business will be hard to kill. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/wpp-shares-slide-as-revenue-growth-slows-1488529744">According to Ad Age</a>, US ad agencies reeled in over $48 billion in 2016. And the industry employs 200,000 people. So it's not about to disintegrate overnight.But growth in this business is undoubtedly slowing. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/wpp-shares-slide-as-revenue-growth-slows-1488529744">The ad-agency holding company WPP</a> recently posted its slowest growth rate in years, The Wall Street Journal reported. Similarly, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/omnicom-remains-cautious-on-earnings-outlook-amid-global-uncertainty-1492534679">Omnicom Group provided markedly cautious guidance </a>for the near future."There's little question that there are tougher times ahead," Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, told Business Insider. Wieser laid out the risks facing the ad-agency holding-company giants, which have enjoyed strong growth in recent years from their media-buying agencies. That may be slowing dramatically, because of marketers squeezing their budgets and reduced demand, among other factors."Agencies are said to be like cockroaches," he said. "But even in a nuclear winter, cockroaches may have a tougher time."Yet even as advertising has been disrupted by macro trends, such as software-driven ad buying, agencies have proved fairly resilient. "People talk about whether agencies ... and this function [they serve] will still exist, but there are a lot of people involved here," said Brian Lesser, North American CEO of the ad-buying giant GroupM, at a conference hosted by the trade company VideoNuze."And understanding a client's needs and determining exactly how to translate that into a media plan ... we'll always occupy that space," Lesser added.<h2>Things are undoubtedly changing</h2>Jordan Bitterman, chief marketing officer at the Weather Company, logged two decades at agencies. He says they will survive but their scope will shrink.For one thing, he said many big marketers' overall businesses are struggling. <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-american-retail-apocalypse-in-photos-2017-3">Look at the retail industry</a>, for example."This is just the new reality," he said. "The problems roll downhill. Marketing is going to feel it early and often."Bitterman sees more marketers using smaller agencies and vendors on a short-term basis as needed. Need some social videos? Hire a specialist for a few months."The days of a full-service advertising agency offering full service to every client are gone," he said.Booking.com's Rijvers agrees. He still works with several creative agencies as needed, but adds: We've "moved away from retainer relationships," he said. "They are predicated on a predictable future."There's not much that's predictable about media and advertising these days. But Bitterman says there's a role for a smaller agency. Marketers still want agencies to coordinate all the different things they have going on at one time. And they'll always need an outsider's perspective. "Strategy and ideas never go out of vogue," he added.<h2>Trust issues</h2>Mean Girls / Paramount PicturesSome big marketers no longer trust their agencies.Agencies' operational structures are one thing. Relationships, of vital importance in the marketing world, are another.The ad-agency industry is still reeling from last year's bombshell report from the<a href="http://adage.com/article/agency-news/ana-k2-find-evidence-pervasive-agency-rebate-collection/304347/"> Association of National Advertisers</a>, which found that cash rebates and "other non-transparent practices" to be pervasive in the US media-buying world. Essentially, the report, conducted by independent firm K2 Intelligence, found that ad agencies were buying ad space for their marketing clients, and not being open about what they were spending and how much money they were making.And since no names were named, the effect made everyone a suspect."The tension has been heightened," said Andrew Altersohn, CEO at the ad-tech company Adfin. "That's led to an aggressive evaluation of in-house options."In other words, many marketers are saying, If I can't trust my agency, I'll have to take things into my own hands.Examples abound. Chobani has its own creative officer. <a href="https://digiday.com/uk/5-reasons-taking-programmatic-house-remains-headache/">Netflix and L'Oreal have brought more of its ad buying in-house. </a>Western Union has consolidated its agency roster from over a dozen partners, in part because it wants to have a tighter rein on its spending,Libby Chambers, Western Union's chief strategy, product, and marketing officer, told Business Insider that the company is contemplating a full audit of its ad buying, to make sure it's running ads in safe, cost-effective places on the web. "Now we can hold somebody accountable," she said.Yet brands need to be careful what they wish for when they take on agency work, said Charles Cantu, CEO of the ad-buying company Huddled Masses. "In a visceral sense, this is something they want," he said. "The reality is, some are prepared for this and some are not."Meanwhile, the ad-agency trust issues play into consulting companies' hands, said one 30-year agency veteran. Those companies have a reputation for being straightforward and are all about driving business results."These kinds of companies get access to decision makers and are tied into financials," said this executive, who did not wish to comment publicly.<h2>Change is tough</h2><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Queen%27s_Guards_Marching.jpg">Wikimedia</a>The ad business may be seeing a changing of the guard.Wieser of Pivotal Research said that big ad agencies are trying to evolve. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/publicis-to-buy-sapient-for-3-7-billion-1414996107">Publicis's acquisition of the digital-ad company Sapient</a> - which boasted of prowess in consulting - in 2014 was a step in that direction.Jon Mandel, a media consultant who logged three decades in the agency world, including a stint as CEO of the ad-buying firm Mediacom, said it would be very difficult for classic ad agencies to change their ways."They are still set up for fighting the last war," he said. "They haven't really set themselves up for the future war. Instead they are trying to eek out gains from a model than needs to change, while always trying to upsell clients on services."Rosemarie Ryan, another longtime traditional agency executive who know runs the creative-consulting firm Co Collective, put it in even more dire terms."Facebook and Google are the new agencies," she said. "Look who's taking over the beach at Cannes."<h2>The future</h2>Wieser was not predicting total agency destruction, particularly given ad agencies' entrepreneurial nature and constant ability to reinvent themselves. He cited the emergence of search-centric agencies in the early 2000s, mobile agencies a decade ago, and other specialty shops more recently."Agencies are good at moving onto the next big thing," he said.For example, that might mean building specialty practices for marketing via artificial intelligence, or virtual reality."What I can't tell you is whether the next new thing they focus on will be as profitable as the old business." <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/us-government-run-janet-airlines-area-51-2017-5">There is a secret US government airline that flies out of commercial airports</a></h3> Please enable Javascript to watch this video

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