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Deloitte announces new agency partnership to expand digital reality capabilities

Well Placed Cactus is the latest team to join forces with Deloitte to expand its emerging digital offerings

Brisbane and Melbourne-based interactive company, Well Placed Cactus (WPC), is joining forces with Deloitte on a new digital emerging technology team within Deloitte Digital led by lead partner, Steve Hallam.

WPC focuses on technology that helps create immersive experiences, games for purpose, and digital reality solutions.The new partnership will see WPC’s CEO, Jack Gillespie join Deloitte as a director. Meanwhile WPC’s COO Paul Stapelberg, co-founder and creative director, Nic Gomez, and technical director, Leigh Mannes will come on board as managers.

“We believe emerging technologies will have a profound impact on both organisations and individuals,” Hallam said. “Bringing WPC team’s engineering expertise in-house is a natural evolution of our end-to-end digital offerings to use fringe and emerging technologies for our clients.

“WPC’s deep technical understanding allows us to move from the realm of generating great creative ideas into also building and delivering them, which is really exciting.”

Gillespie said his team has already worked with Deloitte on some cutting edge projects over the past couple of years and is thrilled to integrate WPC’s technical expertise into Deloitte Digital's existing creative capability.

“For an organisation of Deloitte’s scale to bring an established emerging technology team in-house is a huge step forward for the industry,” he said. “An excellent example of the results we can achieve together is last year’s award winning ANZ Virtual Garden in Sydney’s Martin Place – a three-storey high, interactive garden installation.

“Deloitte Digital’s creative team had an ambitious vision for a dynamic, living and beautiful concept store, and through close collaboration, we were able to turn that vision into a digital reality.”

Deloitte Consulting managing partner, Robert Hillard, said joining forces with the WPC team will take Deloitte Digital from leveraging proven technologies to being pioneers in new technology domains.

“We can think holistically around the total transformation for a particular business and industry sector,” he said. “The transaction with WPC also provides a logical extension to our previous transactions. We’re expanding on the capabilities introduced by Kid Neon in terms of building architectural visualisations and we’re building on our ability to deliver real brand experiences through our Creative Brand & Media team.”

WPC’s team of 11 members will join Deloitte’s Brisbane and Melbourne offices, working alongside Deloitte’s new creative brand and media team to bring clients fresh creative experiences, expanding Deloitte Digital’s market leading offering to over 470 people in Australia.

“Deloitte is a leader in digital innovation and technology,” Deloitte Australia CEO, Cindy Hook said. “The WPC team will further drive our business expertise and design capabilities to enhance integrated and creative solutions to help our clients solve their most complex problems.”

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