Global professional services company Accenture continues to shift its focus towards cloud services, sustainability, and security, and is doing so with a number of acquisitions and a new marketing campaign.
Last year, Accenture invested nearly $900 million in training and development, $1.5 billion in acquisitions, and approximately $900 million in research and development. So far in 2020, the company has acquired N3, a tech-driven sales and demand-generation firm, and made a strategic investment in InCountry, a data residency-as-a-service platform provider. Earlier this month, Accenture also bought Enimbos, a Madrid-based provider of cloud migration and related services, enhancing its Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities, multi-cloud strategy, and cloud migration services in Spain and Portugal.
In addition, Accenture recently announced that it would be making a $3 billion investment over three years in Accenture Cloud First, a new multi-service group of 70,000 cloud professionals that will help clients become “cloud first” businesses and accelerate their digital transformation.
Now the company has announced the launch of its biggest brand change, as well as a new company purpose. The campaign, called “Let there be change,” will triple the company’s annual media spending to $90 million. Accenture started working on the campaign one year ago as it began to change its business to become 70% focused on digital, cloud, and security by 2020. The company achieved that goal a few weeks ago.
“Exponential changes in technology were transforming the way we work and live before COVID-19, and now its impact has raised change to a new level, requiring companies to reimagine everything and requiring economies and entire industries to rebuild,” said Julie Sweet, Chief Executive Officer of Accenture. “In this moment, to emerge stronger there is only one choice: embrace change and ensure that it benefits all — your customers, people, shareholders, partners and communities.”
The campaign was developed by creative agency Droga5, which Accenture acquired last year. The process has included rebranding 800 offices worldwide, updating 473 pages of its website, as well as another 100 internal websites and applications. The company also plans to run its first synchronous international broadcast TV campaign along with 40 paid media partnerships and programmatic ads across 1,000 websites and more than 100 social accounts. With big moves like this from major IT services companies, it its clear that cloud services will continue to take over the industry.
