‘This is what the future will look like’: Accenture Song has moved upstream of advertising

What’s emerging is a control layer in marketing services — one that increasingly determines how marketing labor, data and tech are orchestrated inside large enterprises.

“We do not go to market talking only about marketing,” said Ndidi Oteh, CEO of Accenture Song. “We talk about customer service, commerce, sales, design and digital products.”

When Oteh stepped into the role last fall, she did not inherit an agency. She took on what Accenture has explicitly positioned as an operating layer that sits above them. That became formal last summer when Accenture folded Song into its Reinvention Services unit alongside strategy, consulting and technology — placing marketing inside one of its primary growth engines rather than on the perimeter of its services portfolio. 

In practice, that puts Song upstream of advertising. Where the holdcos are built to monetize media and creative services, Song operates at the industrial layer of modern marketing. It designs data architecture, integrates platforms, reshapes workflows and retrains teams that increasingly operate insider AI-led systems. This is less about competing for agency of record budgets and more about defining how marketing runs inside large enterprises. 

Mondelez is a clear example. Song recently helped the CPG manufacture scale a generative AI platform designed to cut content production costs by an estimated 30 to 50%. But the work did not stop there. It extended beyond automation into retraining marketing teams, restructuring workflows and redesigning decision systems once hundreds of AI-generated variations become routine rather than exceptional.

“You can’t answer those questions if you’re just focused on an ad,” Oteh said.

Partnerships are as central as owned assets to answering those questions. It is a notable posture for a business that last acquired influencer agency Superdigital and marketing consultancy MomentumABM and was even reported to have explored a deal for WPP. Oteh declined to discuss what may be on the table for 2026, instead pointing to the partnerships Song is building — and looking to deepen — across the enterprise tech stack.

“When it comes to the largest tech companies — the Googles, Microsofts, Amazons and Adobes — we’re usually their number one partner globally,” Oteh said. “We spend a lot of time together saying, ‘This is what the future is going to look like.’”

Not every CMO is operating at that altitude. But more are moving in that direction as the marketing function undergoes a broader reappraisal. CMOs are increasingly accountable for growth, commerce performance, data architecture and workforce design. Titles and reporting lines are shifting as marketing takes on a more operational mandate. Campaign production is giving way to ownership of the machinery that makes growth work — the data pipelines, measurement logic, martech stacks and workflows that connect them. 

As Oteh explained: “The senior marketers we talk to increasingly ask about how they can drive additional revenue, or how they address their NPS scores, and actually engage with their various stakeholders in different ways. And they’re all having to learn how to do more of all of that with less.”

It helps, of course, being embedded inside a firm that already has the ear of CEOs and CFOs. Often the reason Song got the call is because Accenture was already in the building. Oteh, however, said more CMOs are turning to Song not simply out of proximity but necessity because it can structure both sweeping reinventions and incremental transformation wedges depending on how much change an organization can absorb. 

Once embedded at that operating layer, these relationships tend to become sticky, creating structural dependence than rotational agency rosters. 

Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun alluded to that dynamic on the company’s most recent earnings call in the fall. While the group’s advertising business felt the drag of macroeconomic pressure, Sadoun said clients were increasing spend in Publicis’ consulting practice as they moved to accelerate their agentic AI efforts. 

Sadoun said: “For the time being, this has mostly materialized into an increasing demand on AI consulting projects. So again, it’s really by consulting project that today Sapient is returning in positive territory, not to CapEx, but to this opportunity with many, many clients to show them the way for them to understand the road map.”

On that basis, the consulting-led marketing model always made conceptual sense. What it lacked was technological feasibility. 

“Any company that is not a tech company will be irrelevant,” said Oteh.