Accenture Acquires Content Production Company ‘CreativeDrive’

A global content production company CreativeDrive is acquired by Accenture. Creative Drive uses cloud-based technology to produce content for clients. To enhance the content, digital marketing, media, and commerce service offerings Accenture will use Creative Drive’s platform. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In the U.S., Latin America, Asia, and Europe CreativeDrive’s network include more than 150 studios. The company’s client roster includes Estée Lauder, Michael Kors, and Walmart. It was founded in 2015. New York-based CreativeDrive has 700 employees and more than 400,000 square feet of studio space.

Brian Whipple, CEO of Accenture Interactive, in a statement, said, “The acquisition of CreativeDrive is an investment in our clients and their future success — positioning us even more strongly to help them rise to this challenge and create a content revolution in a creative, cost-effective and agile manner.”

David Clark, chief marketing officer of JEGI Clarity, an investment bank which advised on the CreativeDrive deal, said: “CreativeDrive is a challenger to the traditional agency model. Unlike other production firms who work with larger agencies (or within, for example, WPP’s Hogarth), CreativeDrive’s relationships are ‘direct-to-client’.”

There is a big opportunity because of the “high-volume, high-velocity creative production needs of large, multi-brand marketers – across logos, products, geographies, seasons, image types and distribution points – through a single relationship and on a single platform”, he said, adding “the cost and process efficiencies involved here are enormous”.

Creative Drive’s “really smart meta-tagging of digital marketing assets” also helps with “production automation, personalization and performance tracking”, which was attractive to Accenture Interactive as it can be used “in concert” with the consulting firm’s other capabilities such as programmatic and artificial intelligence, according to Clark.