How to replace a legend when your industry faces an existential crisis

David Droga was the face of Accenture Song even before it was called Accenture Song. The ad legend sold his agency Droga5 to Accenture’s creative advertising and marketing division then-called Accenture Interactive in 2019. He became CEO of that division in 2021, and rebranded Interactive as Accenture Song in 2022.  

So when he stepped down in May, the $20 billion company was not only losing its CEO, it was also losing the voice of the agency. Named to lead the new era was Ndidi Oteh, who comes from leading Song’s operations in the Americas, and has been at Accenture for about 14 years, where in her previous role she was the global account lead for Nike, and retail industry strategy and consulting lead for the West Coast.

Earlier this month, Oteh officially sat down behind the CEO desk. Song is facing a lot of the same challenges as the rest of the advertising and marketing services industry: layoffs, restructuring, and shifting client budgets—all as AI wreaks havoc on the traditional ways of doing business. But its new CEO believes it has the tools and capabilities to thrive. 

Droga once told AdAge, “You either grow into the future or you’re shrinking into the past.” Oteh says that thanks to Droga’s vision of bringing creativity together with Accenture’s technology and business services, Song has had a head start in preparing for the future of marketing and advertising.

Despite its size, Song is still just about 30% of Accenture’s overall business. The larger parent is a broad, global consultancy that specializes in digital transformation and operations efficiency. Not only does this give Song the opportunity to pair its capabilities with Accenture’s, it also shields it from some of the ebb and flow of the ad industry as those industries figure out how to navigate a world where success means more than producing great creative.

“This isn’t a conversation about having a great Super Bowl ad, one could argue it never was,” she says. “The reality is now, we aren’t only talking about marketing. We’re talking about marketing, customer service, social commerce, sales, creating digital products, and how that should all be powered by AI. We have always had the right pieces, but we are now connecting all of it in a way that’s very different.”

Industry of one

In Accenture’s most recent earnings report, released last week, Song’s revenue was up by 8% to $20 billion. Despite the positive results, Song is not immune to the shifts in its business. As of September 1, Accenture bundled services including strategy, consulting, Song, technology, and operations into a single integrated business unit called Reinvention Services. Song’s parent company, which has a workforce of about 800,000, also laid off more than 11,000 employees over the last three months as part of a $865 million restructuring program. 

The holding company model is in a state of flux, with significant consolidation reflecting the need for greater efficiency. Omnicom and Interpublic are merging to create the world’s largest advertising and marketing services holding company. Publicis recently combined Publicis Worldwide and Leo Burnett into a single entity called Leo.

The promise of the holding company model has always been to deliver world-class creative and strategy at scale, with technology, media, and everything else all under one roof. Traditionally, a major hurdle has been overcoming the fact that most of these capabilities are from separate companies, gradually acquired by the holding company, and silo’d from each other in a way that is both confusing and inefficient for the clients.

Companies under the same parent have often been competing against each other more than collaborating, with clients complaining about workflow bottlenecks and a lack of consistency. All the recent consolidation is an effort to strip away these barriers.

In 2022, Song itself consolidated a number of the creative agencies under its roof, moving all but Droga5 under one P&L. Song has made more acquisitions in the last few years. In August, it acquired social and influencer agency Superdigital. And in 2024, it bought consumer engagement firm Unlimited, digital design and tech agency Work & Co., and Brazilian creative shop Soko. Oteh says that Song approaches acquisitions through the lens of capability, building, and expansion.

“In most cases, we either already have the capability, and we’re saying we want to do more, or we’re saying we see this is where the future is heading, and we want to make sure that we have it,” she says. 

The key is how it’s integrated into the company as a whole. “How do we embed it so all of us lift, not that there’s just this siloed organization?” she says. “If we can’t, that doesn’t help you drive reinvention. Our clients are asking for a company that understands how everything’s connected, how to bring people together, and how to bring different functions and capabilities to be able to drive those harmonized customer experiences.”

Oteh says Song sits apart from the ad holding companies by virtue of its own parent company. “I don’t really think about where Accenture fits in comparison to holding companies,” says Oteh. “Song is powered by Accenture, and that means the foundation of technology. Actually understanding your data—what it takes to build an AI infrastructure—is what Accenture does every day. In many cases, Accenture is already helping them with the infrastructure, so that allows us to have different types of insights into what they need to do to really make sure they’re driving growth with their customers. I think that puts us in what feels a little bit like an industry of one.”

Growth engine CMO

A decade ago, Oteh says that many CMOs had given away a lot of the core components of their brands’ connections to the customer. The technology teams owned the consumer data, as well as the strategy around digital tools like e-commerce. In too many C-suites, the CMO was brand-only. Oteh says this has shifted dramatically. 

“They were spending a lot of time talking about what to build from a messaging and marketing perspective, but the other core components of what it takes to truly understand your customer had been given out,” she says. “Now, there’s not a CMO today who is not talking about two things: First, I have to do more with less. And second, getting better insight out of my customer data to drive forward.”

For Oteh, CMOs should be the growth engine again for their company, instead of marketing being the first stop when cuts need to be made.  

“The CMO wants to be at the center again, and in order to do that, they have to really make sure that they’re modernizing the way in which they work,” she says. “Maybe gone are the days where you have 100 different agencies that you’re working with. Maybe gone are the days that you’re spending most of your time doing your operational tasks that truly can be done through AI. There has to be a transition, and every single CMO that we talk to today is saying, ‘How do you help us get there?'”

Back in 2022, Droga told me the key to Song’s success was about making sure that it can effectively combine its strengths with those of the rest of Accenture’s capabilities.  

Now, Oteh says the real challenge is to do everything they’ve been doing, but faster. “So many of the opportunities that we’ve had over the past year are not just about marketing, but about sales, customer service, design, building a product, and connectivity to finance,” she says. “And that did not used to happen at the rate that is happening now.”

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