Dive Brief:

• Accenture has acquired Austin-based digital optimization firm Clearhead to become part of Accenture Interactive, per an Accenture press release.
• Clearhead is a testing and optimization company that helps brands continuously test, redesign and personalize digital efforts from customer experiences to digital products.
• “Experience is the new battleground in the digital world and brands need to continuously optimize it across the entire customer journey,” said Glen Hartman, head of Accenture Interactive North America, in the press release. Jeriad Zoghby, global personalization lead, Accenture Interactive, added: “Brands are beginning to realize that experimentation is the new normal and has to be core to their culture, capabilities, and operations in order to offer engaging digital experiences.”

Dive Insight:

Early in the digital marketing revolution, marketers understood one of the real values that set digital marketing apart from traditional channels is the relative ease of measurement and tracking key performance indicators given the concrete data-based nature of digital efforts. With so much data available in real time, it is also easy to test different marketing pieces — such as email subject lines or website design elements, among many others — learn from the results and optimize future efforts based on those findings.

However, getting large marketing organizations to make testing and experimentation a core part of their strategy has been slow going, in part becuase of their size and tradition of spending sometimes years vetting new ideas before bringing them to market. Accenture, in explaining its reasoning behind acquiring Clearhead, suggests those times may be in the past. 

Adding a testing and optimization piece to Accenture Interactive is a natural fit as the management consultancy continues to build a digital division that is increasingly putting pressure on traditional agencies on turf that once solely belonged to the marketing and advertising industry.

In May, Accenture acquired e-commerce solutions provider Media Hive checking off that digital marketing box, and last November it snapped up UK-based creative and digital data agency Karmarama. Last week, Accenture Interactive announced a plan to move into the ad tech space as well with a programmatic tool that leverages artificial intelligence technology to overlay product placements on streaming video content.