Accenture CMO on the ‘Song’ rebrand, its metaverse approach and B2B creativity

When Accenture hired employees before the pandemic, they would spend several days in their local office getting to know their new colleagues. Now it’s a much more global affair, thanks to the metaverse.

Via the consulting giant’s virtual office world, called “Nth floor,” new hires now meet and interact with colleagues from all over the globe digitally in a place called One Accenture Park. The virtual campus, which includes so-called digital twins of real-world offices, was developed with Microsoft and has been used to put some 150,000 new hires through orientation.

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“Now when you start you can meet people from all over the company,” said Jill Kramer, Accenture’s chief marketing and communications officer. The program was “pandemic-accelerated but also helped us learn things we don’t want to go back on. We do want people to meet more people when they start here and this allowed us to create those connections.”

Kramer, who recently marked one year on the job as the company’s top marketing executive, detailed the program during a wide-ranging interview on the latest edition of the Marketer’s Brief podcast. 

Accenture is not only using metaverse tools internally, it is seizing on client interest in virtual worlds to bolster its consulting practice. In March it announced a new business group called the Accenture Metaverse Continuum that is co-led by David Droga and includes what the company describes as 800 “metaverse-skilled professionals.”

Droga’s involvement connects the effort to Accenture Song, formerly known as Accenture Interactive, which includes its marketing services and agency businesses. Kramer worked closely with Droga on the Song rebranding, which involved consolidating over 40 marketing, communications, and consulting companies under one name and P&L, as she described on the podcast.

Asked if there has been any pushback from Accenture-owned agencies about losing their individual brand names, Kramer said: “The ambition is a shared one. There is a reason every one of those agency leaders came to Accenture. There was a dream of a large stage of a larger force of technology and business expertise to tap into to make the biggest creative ambitions come to life.”

Kramer, who sits on this year’s Cannes Lions business-to-business jury, also discussed B2B creativity, which she said is on the rise. While she is prohibited from detailing jury deliberations about potentially Cannes-winning campaigns, she said, “most of the creative I am seeing so far you wouldn't know it is B2B,” adding, “it’s really smart, complex but creative campaigns.”