Accenture Is Buying Droga5, an Ad Agency, Making a Bet on Creativity

“People want a lot more accountability but not at the expense of the magic and the emotion, and that’s where I’d like to think our creative and strategy is a value-add and vice versa,” Mr. Droga said. “You can have the best advertising out there but if the e-commerce is not good or the relationship with the customer and the experience isn’t great, then that’s irrelevant.”

Mr. Droga and Mr. Whipple said that they started acquisition talks about a year ago, using the code name “Stellwagen” for the deal, a reference to a marine sanctuary. (Mr. Whipple is an avid fisherman.) Accenture said it would share more about the internal structure involving Mr. Droga, his executives and Mr. Whipple by the end of May.

Analysts and investors have increasingly posed questions to big advertising holding companies about the threat posed by consulting firms. In recent months, executives from WPP and IPG acknowledged their presence but noted that the firms were not yet big competitors in the creative realm.

“They have not made the investment in creativity that we believe is necessary to compete,” Frank Mergenthaler, IPG’s chief financial officer, said at a conference last month. “They’re buying small agencies in some markets, so they can put in a deck they’ve got a capability, but we’re not seeing them much and we’re not seeing them at scale.”

Mr. Whipple said that he viewed Accenture Interactive’s work in customer experience as a new category, and that the firm is more likely to team up with the holding companies than compete with them. Those partnerships may happen less frequently with the acquisition of Droga5, though, he said.

Other prominent independent agencies have remained steadfast in maintaining their autonomy. In 2017, Wieden & Kennedy, the agency in Portland, Ore., best known for its work with Nike, backed a new agency in Austin on the condition that it too must remain independent. Colleen DeCourcy, the firm’s co-president, said at the time, “Our whole abhorrence of controlling interest in anything is that you lose the independence to put the work first.”

Mr. Whipple pushed back at the notion that consultants do not understand creativity the way that traditional agencies do, saying that the cultures of Accenture Interactive and Droga5 were more similar than people might expect.