Dive Brief:

• Accenture is looking to continue building out its Accenture Interactive division with the acquisition of Altima, a full-service digital agency based in France with offices in China, Canada and the U.S., per a press release.
• Altima was founded in 1997 and has a focus on e-commerce, mobile and in-store commerce. For Accenture, the agency would add experience strategy, user experience design, digital marketing services and multichannel commerce platform implementation.
• “Experiences are where brands win and lose customers, today more than ever. Adding Altima’s skills to Accenture Interactive will help in our mission to create the best experiences on the planet for clients,” Anatoly Roytman, head of Accenture Interactive Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Latin America as well as global digital commerce lead for Accenture, said in a statement.

Dive Insight:

The acquisition will be one more step in Accenture’s move into a business space once clearly held by traditional marketing and advertising agency holding companies. It is the seventh acquisition of a marketing agency in the past five years by Accenture. 

Accenture is in the process of creating a formidable digital division with Accenture Interactive, and at least one Wall Street analyst has floated the idea that the consultancy could outright buy one of the big five holding companies, such as WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, Interpublic or Dentsu. Those groups have been slow to react to the shift to digital marketing and brands' needs in a quickly evolving media environment. Just yesterday, Omnicom reported its second consecutive quarterly revenue drop, with revenue declining 1.9% to $3.79 billion. The agency holding group's programmatic trading desk retreated by 0.2% from a year ago. The group said it is putting more emphasis on CRM and building its data chops, per a report in Adexchanger. 

Going forward, Accenture is likely to continue pursuing a strategy of chipping away at talent available to the holding companies and adding to its roster of services globally. At the same time, agencies will look for ways to strengthen their relationships with brands, including adding their own consultancy services.