From the Performance Marketing Insider archive. Originally published January 2017. Revisited October 2026.

Accenture Just Makes Sh*t

In early 2017 a consulting firm was buying its way into the agency business and calling itself the biggest digital network on earth. The headline survives. The original text does not.

By Pesach Lattin

This post first ran on Performance Marketing Insider (performinsiders.com), the affiliate and lead generation trade site Pesach Lattin published from 2011 to 2020. The original text was lost when that site went dark. This page sits at the same address the old links point to, keeps the original headline and date, rebuilds the subject from the public record, and says what happened next.

The headline on this January 2017 post is the only part that survived, and we could not establish from the public record exactly which Accenture announcement provoked it. What we can show is what Accenture was doing in the ad business at the time, which goes a long way toward explaining the tone.

What Accenture was doing

In May 2016, Accenture Interactive announced that Ad Age had named it the world's biggest and fastest-growing digital agency network. In November 2016, it bought the London creative shop Karmarama, with its head describing the deal as joining "the world's largest digital agency." Earlier that year an Accenture survey had warned that ad blockers threatened the digital ad market. A consulting firm that billed by the hour was now selling creative, and telling the agency world it had already won.

In May 2017, Ad Age ranked Accenture Interactive the top digital network for a second straight year, with about $4.4 billion in 2016 revenue, up about 51%, and sixth among all agency companies worldwide.

How it aged

The consultant did not go away. Accenture bought Droga5 in 2019 and rebranded the whole operation as Accenture Song in 2022, with revenue reported around $19 billion by 2024. In 2025 David Droga stepped back from running it, and Accenture announced job cuts for staff it could not retrain for AI work and lowered its growth outlook.

Whatever the original target was, the argument underneath it held up: the agency business was being taken over by firms whose core product is the deck, and the industry kept giving them the trophies.

This page rebuilds a January 2017 Performance Marketing Insider post whose original text is not available; the specific announcement it responded to was not identified, and the page says so. Facts come from Accenture's own 2016 and 2017 releases, Ad Age's agency report as announced by Accenture, The Drum and B&T. Disclosure: the author has competed with and covered agency holding companies for two decades.