Has Accenture Song set its sights on a deal with Omnicom’s creative agencies?

The Cannes Lions are expected to initiate new deals – or seal them at the Eden Roc – and a tempting idea is coming from France (with some delay): Accenture Song could buy up some or even all of the creative agencies of its US competitor Omnicom.

Accenture Song (formerly Accenture Interactive) is a group of technology-based agencies led by Droga5. It also includes the former Karmarama in the UK and The Monkeys in Australia, although these agencies are by no means the largest part. And Accenture Song is big: with revenue of $18 billion, it’s on a par with WPP and ahead of Publicis (Accenture’s total revenue is around $70 billion).

Omnicom has long built on its formidable range of global creative networks: BBDO, DDB and TBWA. But its focus of late has been on media and technology. Last year it bought trade and retail media specialist Flywheel from Cannes Lions owner Ascential for $835 million, its biggest acquisition.

Omnicom is still run by John Wren, who more than a decade ago struck a merger deal with Maurice Levy’s Publicis that would have created the world’s largest marketing and communications company. That fell through for fairly obvious cultural reasons (much to the delight of then-WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell), but it shows that Wren, whose long tenure at Omnicom is coming to an end, is not averse to transformational deals.

None of the advertising holdings make as much money from creative content as they once did. In 1990, Sorrell’s WPP estimated that Y&R (which has since been absorbed into VML) was worth $4.4 billion, nearly half the valuation of WPP as a whole today.

David Droga (above), now joined by Annette King, a consultant at Publicis and previously at Ogilvy, is convinced that Accenture Song, with its technical, consulting and financial resources, can take the top spot in the global creative industry. Accenture has so far steered clear of media agencies because it has too much media consulting business.

Even one of Omnicom’s creative networks would be a bold statement (the most likely would be DDB, currently run by UK-based adam&eveDDB). All of these networks would be an exercise in shape-shifting.