‘Doing Something Differently Was The Right Call’: Why Akcelo Could Be Your Next Agency
To say 2024’s B&T Awards caused a stir would be something of an understatement. EssenceMediacom, still relatively new post-merger, beat out more established opposition to win our Media Agency of the Year trophy and Born won Emerging Agency of the Year, besting similarly new agencies founded by more experienced senior industry heads.
But perhaps the biggest shock for many in the room was that the overall Agency of the Year title did not go to a traditional advertising agency. It went to Akcelo—an agency just as concerned with customer experience and activations as it is with big, expensive TVCs.
The B&T team fielded a lot of questions that night. And continued to do so in the months that followed. But as we said announcing the winners, the world is changing—and agencies need to keep up.
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To illustrate just how unusual Akcelo’s win was, B&T’s Advertising Agency of the Year has also won the overall Agency of the Year going four times in the last five years. BMF won both in 2019, Special did the double twice in 2020 and 2021 and Howatson+Company managed it in 2022. In 2023, Special won the Grand Prix with Thinkerbell nabbing Advertising Agency of the Year—if you’re keeping score at home.
Now that the dust has settled and (after talking to some of the team in Akcelo’s Redfern office) the hangovers have subsided, here’s why we think adland could learn more than a thing or two from the agency.
Thinking Differently About Brands
Let’s go back to the start. Akcelo (‘Acceleration’ in Esperanto, a mooted universal language to put an end to international wars, if you’re unfamiliar) was founded in 2020 by five of the VMLY&R Australia and New Zealand leadership team: CEO Aden Hepburn; head of strategy and innovation Dave Di Veroli; Sydney managing partner Miles Scott; design director Mark Berry; and chief growth officer Peter Collins.
“When we were at VML, we started getting this lightbulb moment and felt that there was a gap in the market,” said Hepburn, now Akcelo’s overall top dog.
“There were lots of agencies that played in the advertising space that were doing really nice, evocative advertising,” added Di Veroli, now Akcelo’s chief strategy officer.
“Locally that could have been The Monkeys [now Droga5] and then there were agencies that did experience design, but it was highly functional and utilitarian. We saw this world which blended experience, design, brand and creativity.
“The likes of R/GA were in the field, in their heyday with Nike+ and the Nike Fuel Band. They were the epitome of an agency creating inspiring brand acts that could get people in the world beyond communications.”
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“It was a couple of months pre-COVID,” added Di Veroli. “We literally put our knapsack on and started this thing. Then we went straight into lockdown. It was probably our nimbleness and small, agile size that helped us succeed in those early days.”
Nowadays, it lists McDonald’s, TikTok, Asahi, Tinder, PepsiCo, Red Bull, SPC and Salesforce among its clients—each with different scopes of work and across different regions. For instance, it works with TikTok in 23 countries around the world. The work is also split roughly 60-40 between retained and project-based clients, though Hepburn and the team say they have long, committed relationships with several clients.
“For us, our business model and the way we work, we’re very good at project work and that’s probably the case because we grew up building VML which started as a digital agency when digital was just projects at the time,” said Hepburn.
“It’s like we’ve spent our whole career building, winning and growing project clients into ongoing clients, versus maybe the traditional agency model that only ever survived off retainers from forever ago and now they’re trying to figure out what it means when they don’t have a guaranteed commitment.”
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“We were very conscious,” continued Di Veroli, “that we weren’t calling ourselves an agency from day one. We called ourselves an innovation company and a brand experience company. For us, it was about opening the aperture so that we could do more consultative work, more digital innovation and amazing creativity as well.”
“On a personal level, when we were building VML here, we were just known as a digital shop because, globally, it was that at the time,” said Hepburn.
“We’d gone from this one extreme of being incredibly digital to wanting to be seen as broad brush. Relevance was everything to us, so we needed to be able to appeal to the marketer of the future who knew that just digital, or just technology, or just CX, or just a TV ad, was not the future. It needs to be more rounded. For us, it’s about developing those C-level relationships to be that agency that can take a client into the future.
“The world went super-specialist and then as the different specialisms became expected—the minimum viable product that an agency can deliver—you couldn’t be those things any more. If you look at the marketing landscape now, most agencies fit into one of those buckets and very few can actually work across the whole customer journey. That’s what we want to build,” added Hepburn.
Of course, that isn’t to say that marketers can’t have their Akcelo experience à la carte. You can take a bit of experiential here, or a bit of digital there. Or in the case of McDonald’s, a lot of digital.
Making Macca’s Marketing Mega
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Perhaps Akcelo’s most notable client is McDonald’s. When we visit the agency’s main Redfern headquarters, there’s almost an entire floor dedicated to fine-tuning the fine points of McDonald’s customer experience.
There are screens covering the wall showing how different designs would appear on brand new in-store menus. Others, smaller and more pixelated, showing alternatives in less highfalutin branches. There are others showing all manner of in-app variations and, of course, the Monopoly campaign.
“You wouldn’t expect an independent agency that started less than five years ago to have the expanse of remit [Akcelo has with McDonald’s]. That’s the part from designing the experiences through the restaurant with the kiosk design to the digital screens to these [Happy Meal] boxes… To the big TVC and everything in between. For us, they’re an example of a brand that is unlocking all our capability and benefitting from it across the spectrum,” said Di Veroli.
“Consumers don’t just experience a brand through a TVC or out-of-home,” added Akcelo’s Global Executive Creative Director Louise McQuat, dialling in from the agency’s office in Vancouver.
“The experience that they have with the app or in-store, or through the website or the other things that they interact with, are just as important, if not more important than what the brand stands for and the comms that they put out. All of that feeling connected and equally proportioned as a single message and that consistency is really important. If you can’t thread that needle across the whole brand experience, then you’re feeling fragmented and your consumers might be confused about who you are.”
“Consumers don’t just experience a brand through a TVC or out-of-home,” added Akcelo’s global executive creative director Louise McQuat, dialling in from the agency’s office in Vancouver.
“The experience that they have with the app or in-store, or through the website or the other things that they interact with, are just as important, if not more important than what the brand stands for and the comms that they put out. All of that feeling connected and equally proportioned as a single message and that consistency is really important. If you can’t thread that needle across the whole brand experience, then you’re feeling fragmented and your consumers might be confused about who you are.”
The Akcelo team has executed similarly broad work for the likes of Salesforce, TikTok and Tinder, with all three brands showing up in unexpected ways. Some of the work for these brands the team weren’t allowed to speak on the record about, given its sensitivity. Its work for Salesforce, however, was in broad daylight—in fact, The Waild West Saloon was in the middle of Sydney’s Barangaroo.
“AI is a big discussion point, but Salesforce came to us from a B2B point of view and said ‘We want to get this C-suite audiences to start debating what the potential outcomes of adopting AI are, who’s actually marshalling it, who’s going to be looking after it in the future?’ This was a very bespoke creation for a very senior audience to try to get them discussing what the future looks like with AI… For us, the future is shaped by bold brand acts, so it isn’t just comms,” said Di Veroli.
Never Being Comfortable
The final part of the Akcelo equation is culture. Agencies, like any business that experiences rapid expansion, can have growing pains, particularly if they’re spread across multiple geographies.
But while the business has grown rapidly, Akcelo thinks it can avoid the pitfalls of other agencies that have grown quickly thanks to the founding team’s experience at VMLY&R.
“It’s not our plan to buy and merge a bunch of agencies into ourselves. I don’t think we’ll get to a point of trying to figure out who we are. We’ve got a very strong sense of mission, pride, culture and DNA… You never know what the future holds but I think we’re pretty true and strong to what we can be,” said Hepburn.
“We’re quite tough on never being comfortable,” added McQuat.
“Traditional agencies got really good at doing the things that they do. But I think we like being uncomfortable and challenging ourselves to not just do things the way they’ve always been done or the way we did it last time. It’s always challenging ourselves to think about the smartest, newest and most interesting way to solve a problem.”
The agency’s approach to culture has seen it notch two very different accolades. The first, and more conventional, being listed on the AFR’s Best Places to Work list. The second, and certainly more unconventional, saw a staffer get the agency’s logo tattooed on himself.
It’s certified carbon neutral. Its office in Redfern is so swish but so disarmingly friendly looking that regular punters walking by have been known to mistake it for co-working space or even a coffee shop. It also has ‘work from anywhere’ weeks, giving the chance for its cadre of international staffers, in particular, the chance to work remotely around holidays to see family.
It has automated timesheets to free staff from that most mind-numbing of tasks, and its top-performing staff even get equity in the business.
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The Whole Picture
Perhaps the only thing trendier than wanting to win advertising awards, is not wanting to win them at all.
But Akcelo’s win back in December was brilliant to behold. The agency won Experiential Agency of the Year, Independent Agency with more than 50 Employees and the coveted NSW Agency of the Year trophy—giving it the most Agency trophies on the night. With each passing win, the team’s celebrations became louder.
“We reflected on it the week after and we’ve obviously won the emerging agency stuff, then we started winning all the experiential agency stuff, then we were trying to find a way to tell our independent agency story in a really unique way that showed the breadth of what we did,” said Hepburn, noting that Akcelo had come close to winning big at multiple awards shows.
“[Agency of the Year] awards are a big thing for us. They’re the true reflection because they measure your whole company,” he added.
“Everyone felt so proud,” added Di Veroli.
“It was a great acknowledgement in our belief in doing something a little bit differently and doing something in a different area was the right call.”
In an industry obsessed with thinking differently to reach consumers, it’s notable that we often do not think differently about how agencies serve clients. Akcelo is. And it’s winning.
Read more:
‘I Had No Tolerance For Talk About Legacy Brands’ – Inside EssenceMediacom’s Award-Winning Merger
