The hidden value in The Monkey’s $63m purchase price
The $63m sale of The Monkeys to Accenture was widely acknowledged with shock and confusion, with many considering the two companies’ cultures as fundamentally incompatible. In actual fact, the rare combination of creative and analytic minds might actually shoot the two businesses into the stratosphere, writes Antony Giorgione.
The Monkeys: Michael Buckley, Mark Green, Scott Nowell and Justin Drape
In his book ‘The Power of Habit’, Charles Duhigg told the story of the Aluminum Company of America’s CEO Paul O’Neill.
The Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) was an industrial behemoth, and in 1987 it was bleeding customers and profits due to poor management decisions. The internal culture was riven with frustration – at one point 15,000 employees went on strike.
You are assuming Accenture management consultants will work hand-in-hand with Moneys creative dudes, to bring some sort of incredible lateral-thinking solutions to business problems, which until this point have escaped the best and brightest law and MBA graduates of our time.
Quite a long bow to draw
Thanks for the feedback @Maybe.
I agree there will be massive cultural differences to overcome. In the first instance, the alphas in management consulting will not appreciate these newcomers treading on their space. So The Monkeys will have to navigate the realpolitik of life inside a number crunching giant.
Though I cannot support my theory of commodification within the management consulting space, there is another factor to consider.
Private equity supplanted the management consulting sector in providing the best of the best graduates with a more effective path to greatness. Their model involves a highly concentrated synthesis of business process, and the ownership of the business undergoing change was owned or controlled by the private equity business, which means fewer hurdles to implementation.
But now the constituents of this sector too are at some sort of parity.
And we presently have Silicon Valley vacuuming up those best of the best.
Agree with you on this. I think the management consulatncies are struggling for growth and hence are sweeping up marketing agencies to help with growth and expand service offering. Unlike you, I dont think the end game is to combine the talents of creatives and management consulting to form some sort of hybrid consultant offering (though that does sound cool). Just too many internal hurdles / cultures / egos to get over to make that happen in the short term at least.
But hey, the world moves quickly.. come back in 2 years and lets see how successful the acquisition is, and if they have integrated anything at all
My very rough estimation is that they will be able to demonstrate part-of-business change (i.e. within another silo that’s not specifically marketing nor IT) within three years, and 5+ years for a whole-of-business case study to emerge. Aeons in this fast paced world.
It’s entirely possible that none of the current Monkeys staff will strike this gold themselves, but that they might provide an internal filter/school for future graduates (the best creative I ever worked with won AWARD school after tertiery studies in accounting).
As I mentioned, you can’t bottle this, so this piece is very pie in the sky. But with automation encroaching upon process-driven tasks, I think the accounting majors are looking elsewhere to bolster their capabilities.
I like it!
Thanks Gezza
I congratulate the author for trying to raise the bar on this but it’s wishful.
Accenture wants a slice of the creative comms pie. Plain and simple.
Consultants have been number crunching ideas for donkeys. Ideas have been coming from consultants, technologists, innovators, designers for years so infering creative agencies are now the untapped holy grail for breakthrough thinking in business contexts, I’m unconvinced.
Take a look at previous purchases there and how they’ve been utilised and succeeded (or not).
Yes, I agree most of the valuation sits with creative comms.
But let me quote a specific question from Campaign Brief and answer from Justin Drape…
‘What kind of business transformation capabilities can the agency now present to clients?
We can now go a lot deeper when it comes to understanding business objectives beyond marketing. We’re still going to be focussed on providing strategic thinking and creative solutions but, whenever the opportunity presents itself, the strategy and ideas will be more seamlessly connected to the insights gleaned from the business platforms and customers needs that Accenture Interactive have established.’
* http://www.campaignbrief.com/2.....drape.html