100 days after the acquisition by Accenture, the Unlimited Group is optimistic about the future

This is arguably the biggest move of her tenure so far: the acquisition of British agency group Unlimited in April, which comprises over 600 employees under four main brands: creative agency TMW, communications business Nelson Bostock, market research institute Walnut and a healthcare practice.

Following the acquisition, Unlimited has retained these brands and will sit alongside Droga5 in Song’s wider agency portfolio. There has been a change at the top, however, with Chris Mellish, who previously headed TMW, being appointed Group Chief Executive (of Unlimited).

Unlimited potential

Unlimited, formerly known as Creston, was owned by private equity firm DBay Advisors from 2016 until this year’s sale. Mellish’s predecessor, Tim Hasset, left Unlimited when the sale went through after fulfilling what Mellish calls “the same purpose of all private equity firms”: to “reshape, restructure and put it in a stronger position for sale” (the remaining executives will stay on, with Tim Bonnett remaining president).

Hassett, says Mellish, “was hired for a specific job. We always knew this transition would happen at the point of sale. Now it’s my job to bring him into this new world.”

Mellish admits the group has spoken to “more than one potential suitor” about a sale, but the move to Accenture allows Unlimited to keep the momentum going in one direction: taking on the advertising giants. “Over the last few years,” says Mellish, “we’ve had quite an entertaining run taking on the big, traditional networks. We’ve enjoyed those successes and grown – bucking some industry trends.”

Accenture is, of course, a behemoth of its kind – its 2023 revenues of $64 billion dwarf those of WPP ($19 billion), the world’s largest “traditional” agency network. In fact, some media have reported that Song’s own revenues are fast approaching WPP’s at $18 billion. The Drum has not seen confirmation of these figures, but if they are anywhere near accurate, Song is already one of the world’s largest agency networks, so this is less a David versus Goliath battle and more Goliath versus Goliath.

However, Mellish believes Accenture has a new approach to marketing at this scale. Echoing his new colleague King, Mellish says: “The rules of how we work and deliver for our clients are not yet written. We can start to rewrite this group agency operating model to suit brands.”

Is a new type of network possible?

Unlimited is far from Accenture’s only acquisition in the marketing space. In recent months, the company has also acquired Brazilian creative agency Soko, Thai digital experience shop Rabbit’s Tale, American healthcare marketing agency ConcentricLife, and a number of digital product, data and AI shops. Its ambitions in this space are clear. According to Mellish, this amounts to nothing less than “a reinvention of what it means to be an agency group or network, whatever you want to call it – that was pretty exciting for us. They have a substantive vision that we feel we can really fit into and contribute to.”

Accenture is of course not the only player trying to build a new kind of agency network, but the fortunes of these ‘non-traditional’ players have been mixed of late. Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital, long the poster child for building an alternative kind of network, has fallen on ‘difficult’ times. Brandtech Group, which has just acquired major agencies, has taken a more optimistic stance – but that is apparently because it has bet heavily on AI rather than ‘traditional’ marketing services.

Mellish argues that these different fates boil down to one question: who among the players with the scale to work with big-budget brands can really offer a “full service”? It’s no wonder, he says, that so many in the industry “have started to unify things around their CRM and direct marketing agencies,” with moves like WPP’s “mega-merger” that combined VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson into a single company, VML, last year.

“We work a lot with brands that want their CRM and traditional advertising in one place. Why? Because they see efficiency in that. The real power in terms of communication effectiveness is managing that entire journey together.”

This, says Mellish, is where some agencies with heritage may suffer; in a world where creative agencies have long dominated prestige, those without a background in the more data and behavioural disciplines such as CRM may be at a disadvantage. “Some of these difficulties may be due to their heritage,” he says. “Traditional creative agencies have often taken the lead and it takes time to drive change. Conversely, though, if you’re coming from a purely digital background, you may also find it difficult to orchestrate the whole thing in its entirety.

We come from a middle position… it’s about controlling and understanding ideas from the middle out.”

At a time when “CRM” isn’t exactly the most attractive acronym in marketing, Mellish likes to call it the core of what Unlimited does and what it offers to the Accenture megaorganism. “Good marketing is always about orchestrating the entire customer experience from start to finish and understanding how to pull the right levers at the right time to get the most value… That’s the crux of the matter. Budgets are tight. Companies are under pressure. We really need to prove we’re making an impact.”

But Mellish inevitably argues that past experience with CRM (or whatever) is not enough without also mastering new technologies, and one category of new technologies in particular: AI. These global networking competitors have all bet heavily on this technology, making it the most likely battleground in the industry’s macro drama in the near future. Here, too, Mellish hopes to put Unlimited at the heart of Accenture’s rapidly expanding offering – thanks to its “Human Understanding Lab” of behavioral experts and data scientists.

“We want to use this technology to rapidly democratize access to insights into human behavior,” says Mellish. For his company, AI will serve to “enable our employees and customers to gain a comprehensive understanding of human behavior to develop more effective communications. So we can start to analyze groups of people not by demographics, but by their personality traits and behaviors. These insights can then drive communications across the entire customer experience, not just in CRM, but beyond sales. Can we engage people in different ways? Can we do this quickly? This democratization of real human understanding will help us and brands respond and communicate more effectively.”