Consulting giant strikes deals that see the teams from Blended Digital, New Republique and Venntifact joining its ranks
Deloitte Digital is proclaiming it’ll shortly become Australia’s biggest provider of marketing technology and digital experience consulting capabilities after the teams from Blended Digital, New Republique and Venntifact join its ranks.
The consulting giant this week confirmed the teams of all three agencies will be joining its business, a headcount increase of 70 people. This brings the total number of staff at Deloitte Digital to 1100, double that of its employee numbers in 2018.
Melbourne-based Blended Digital was established in 2018 as a digital experience and marketing consultancy and works with Salesforce, Adobe, Braze and Cheetah Digital. Under the new agreement, its co-founders, Adam Crow and Damon McMillan, become Deloitte consulting partners.
New Republique is the most established of the trio, and focuses on user experience, experimentation and data and analytics. Its tech partners include Fullstory, Optimizely, Webtrends Optimize, Adobe and Salesforce. Again, co-founders, Nima Yassini and Stacey Isaac will become Deloitte Consulting partners.
Credit: Deloitte Venntifact is based in Sydney and was established in 2018. Its emphasis is on customer-centric architecture and data, tech and digital transformation and works with Salesforce, Adobe, Braze, Segment, Tealium and Google. Both its 28 staff, as well as co-founders, Steven Hann and Joey Nguyen, are joining Deloitte, with the latter two becoming partners.
Blended Digital and New Republique join Deloitte Digital from 1 March, while Venntifact joins 8 March 2022. Transactional details of all three deals have not been disclosed.
Deloitte Digital lead partner in Australia, Esan Tabrizi, said the three businesses were part of a long-term strategy to invest in people, skills, technologies and innovations that can help clients with martech, CX and digital transformation work.
Specifically, they increase technological depth in enterprise and emerging marketing technologies, while New Republique brings behavioural and data-driven design capability.
“Our clients are constantly striving to utilise technology and behavioural understanding to drive better customer and stakeholder outcomes, and we believe organisations successfully adopting all things digital will be a key enabler of Australia’s post-Covid recovery,” Tabrizi commented. “Brands are certainly strongly focused on digital engagement. As a result, growth in demand for our marketing technology and customer experience business is relentless, and our growth to meet market demand will not be stopping here.
“We proudly sit at the nexus of creativity and technology and the addition of the incredibly talented teams from Blended Digital, New Republique and Venntifact will provide unmatched scale.”
Co-founders from all three agencies highlighted both the desire to extend services offered to customers, as well as broader growth opportunities for their teams, as reasons for striking deals with Deloitte.
“Joining Deloitte Digital will allow us to offer additional expertise and a wider range of services to our existing client base, and opportunities to showcase our capabilities and our people within large-scale digital transformation projects, working alongside Deloitte’s leading industry talent,” Crow said.
Isaac said the team is excited to be establishing a new service offering within the Deloitte network and help more brands adopt a culture of experimentation, citing the move “a natural next step for our business, allowing us to scale and provide fantastic career progression opportunities for our people”.
“We saw the growing complexity of the marketing technology and customer experience landscape, and oriented towards not only a deep technical understanding of emerging tools like customer data platforms and essential topics like privacy and consent, but also the critical people and process impacts that our clients would need to tackle in order to transform,” Hann added.
“We're now ready to go to another level, take the next step of our journey as part of Deloitte, and see our capabilities and people flourish as part of the Deloitte Digital team.”
Deloitte, like its rival consulting groups, has actively acquired as well as hired in order to build its marketing technology, digital transformation, customer experience and strategic and traditional marketing capabilities.
Other acquisitions over the years have included digital communications agency, The Explainers; technology integrator, SixTree; social analytics consultancy, Digivizer; creative and design agencies, The Monkeys and Maud; creation studio, Madras; and Salesforce implementation agencies Cinder Agency and Soda Strategic.
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