Dive Brief:

• Deloitte has acquired Ad2Pro Global Creative Solutions Private Limited, also known as Madras Global, to bolster its Deloitte Digital marketing services arm, per an announcement. Madras Global bills itself as a global content studio that combines creative expertise with automation and technology. Terms of the deal were not released.
• The deal is expected to strengthen Deloitte Digital's services around content and media advertising production, marketing automation and "extended reality," a channel that encompasses augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). Madras Global, now rebranded as the Deloitte Digital Content Studio, will be integrated into the consultancy's existing advertising, marketing and commerce unit. The agency has a team of roughly 1,000 employees in six offices in the U.S., U.K., Australia and India.
• Todd Brownrout, founder and chief executive officer of Madras Global, is transitioning to a managing director role at Deloitte Digital. The acquisition aims to complement other Deloitte purchases centered on automation, including the artificial intelligence (AI) platform of Magnetic in 2018 and data management firm Web Decisions the year prior.

Dive Insight:

Deloitte Digital adds Madras Global at a moment when digital content production is skyrocketing, putting the onus on marketers to not only generate higher volumes of output but also ensure work is relevant and engaging. In a press statement, Sam Roddick, global head of Deloitte Digital, painted consumers as facing a "tsunami of content" that creates challenges for brands looking to cut through the noise.

The marketing services arm of Deloitte clearly views automation as a means of balancing personalization with scale in the face of these obstacles, with Madras Global building on other AI-related acquisitions and pairing with the unit's proprietary customer experience management platform, Hux. At the same time, Madras Global's specialties in extended reality could represent a bet that clients will seek more help around technologies rooted in the metaverse, an increasingly common concept that blends aspects of the real world with digital ones. Content's role in marketing could also become more significant as CMOs seek alternative methods of engaging consumers in the wake of third-party cookie deprecation, such as through contextual targeting tactics.

Madras Global has worked with marketers including Macy's, Polaris and Fan Fight and commands an average client tenure of six years, according to a corporate website that is being updated to reflect the new ownership. The agency also claims to deliver 4 million content assets annually to its global client base.

"As part of Deloitte Digital, we have an opportunity to take this offering to even greater heights, innovate on our technology platform to deliver differentiated experiences and to help businesses meet the ever-increasing demand for content in a far more personalized, efficient manner," Brownrout said in a press statement.

With the deal, Deloitte Digital takes another step to combine its focus on technology integration with the types of creative services that historically have been owned by traditional ad agencies. Through aggressive M&A, global management consultancies like Deloitte and Accenture have quickly built out advertising networks in competition with Madison Avenue. In response, adland's old guard has increasingly remade itself to more closely mirror the consulting model, a strategy that's started to pay off as the pandemic accelerates investments in e-commerce, data and performance media.