With two very contrasting company cultures, many in Australia’s advertising industry are questioning whether Accenture’s acquisition of The Monkeys will work out, and it seems the two are off to a rocky start.
The Australian Financial Review claims the consulting giant and the creative agency have been clashing over cultural differences since singing the whopping $63 million deal in May.
The Monkeys’ latest lamb ad for Meat & Livestock Australia was highly controversial, reportedly drawing over 200 complaints, including a number from Australia’s Hindu community, who went so far as to petition the federal government to have the ad removed.
You can only image the shock horror on the faces of the suits at Accenture when they saw the ad.
It’s also rumoured that the addition of Crownbet to The Monkeys’ stable of clients hasn’t exactly been met with a whole lot of applause from its parent company.
Crownbet is not really the type of client that the conservative Accenture likes to associate itself with, and apparently The Monkeys didn’t even run the business win past its new owners, according to the AFR.
B&T contacted The Monkeys CEO Mark Green for comment, but to no avail.
However, we did interview Green shortly after the Accenture deal, who insisted the consulting firm’s “global culture” was right for The Monkeys.
“It really was a strategic opportunity to where we wanted the business to go,” he told B&T at the time.
“It felt like a good synergy, a good cultural fit, and the opportunity to create work on a global stage, and that’s what we wanted in this point of time in our evolution.”
Watch this space.
