Exclusive conversation between Accenture CEO Julie Sweet and David Droga: How a ‘ridiculous’ leadership idea led to a remarkable outcome

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. 

When Accenture chair and CEO Julie Sweet asked advertising veteran David Droga to run the consulting giant’s marketing services business in 2021, no one was more surprised than Droga himself: “I remember thinking, ‘That’s ridiculous!’” he recalls.  

Droga wasn’t questioning his ability to do the job. He’d built Droga5 into one of the most acclaimed independent advertising agencies in the world before selling the firm to Accenture in 2019 for an undisclosed sum. Once inside Accenture, he quickly established himself as a force, successfully producing major projects for clients such as Kimberly Clark, Amazon, and Lululemon. Still, Droga questioned whether Sweet wanted someone with his background running a multibillion-dollar portfolio. “I said to her, ‘I don’t think you understand the kind of person I am. I’m a creative thinker; I lead by product and ideas and quality rather than just operations and organization.’” 

But Sweet, who became global CEO in 2019, says she knew exactly what she was getting in elevating Droga to CEO of the unit, which was previously called Accenture Interactive and is now known as Accenture Song. “I wanted a creative not only to build Song, but I actually really felt that I needed that [creative] perspective on my leadership team,” Sweet tells Modern CEO in her first joint press interview with Droga. “We’re big believers in diversity of all kinds, including perspective, and being a creative and a business builder is a different perspective than someone who’s been here for 30 years.”  

Sweet’s bet has paid off: Under Droga’s leadership, Song reported $19 billion in revenue in fiscal 2024, up 35% from Song’s fiscal 2022 revenue of $14 billion (more on how Accenture calculates Song’s revenue in a moment). 

Creativity enters the C-suite 

By many measures, Song’s success—and Droga’s ascent inside Accenture—is a win for those of us who believe creativity and creative leadership are good for business. At a time when many corporations are paring back their creative ambitions (see “Apple is no longer a design-led company”), Accenture has continued to invest in creativity—acquiring agencies such as Rabbit’s Tale in Bangkok and Work & Co., the storied digital products company, and recruiting talent like Sean Lyons, the former global CEO of design firm R/GA—all in the last two years. Accenture has secured new customers on the strength of its design and advertising prowess, no small feat for a company that already serves 9,000 clients in 120 countries; conversely, it has wrung new revenue from existing clients by offering Song’s menu of capabilities.  

Song, meanwhile, has dramatically expanded its scope. When Accenture Interactive launched in 2009, its mandate was to help companies develop digital marketing capabilities and figure out their online and offline strategies. Song—the name the unit adopted in 2022—has made 62 acquisitions since fiscal 2010 and now considers itself a “tech- powered creative business” that offers products in customer experience, sales, commerce, marketing, and business innovation. 
 
That mission may be music to Accenture shareholders’ ears, but it’s the kind of corporate-speak that rankles some creative professionals. “I think we’re in a cycle where creativity is not as valued as it was five or 10 years ago—creativity as a practice but also as a culture of leadership,” says Robert Fabricant, cofounder and partner at Dalberg Design. Fabricant maintains that the creatives who stormed the business world a decade ago got to establish and build all the elements of a customer experience practice. The current crop of corporate creatives tends to be focused on maintaining and sustaining those elements, he says. “Will that cycle correct itself, and will there be a reason to feel more positive about the potential for these leaders to be strong creative forces in corporate America?” he asks. “That’s a big question.” 

Put another way: Has the presence of creative leaders changed Accenture—or has Accenture changed what it means to be a creative?  

Stronger together 

Song’s Droga started Droga5 in 2006 with the aim of becoming the most influential creative agency in the world. Even as the agency grew, he felt like he was only solving part of the puzzle for clients—a thesis that came to life when Accenture invited Droga5 to jointly pitch the U.S. Census Bureau. Droga5 came up with messaging aimed at driving consumer participation in the decennial survey. Accenture’s part of the presentation covered so much more: training the Census takers, developing software to collect the data, and other aspects of the campaign. The companies didn’t win the business, but Droga was sold on something else. “It blew my mind,” he says. “Technology wasn’t in opposition to [creativity]; it was complementary and necessary.”  
 
And selling Droga5 to Accenture wasn’t in opposition to his lofty aspirations, Droga says. “I loved my independence and our independence at Droga5,” he explains. “What Accenture offered from industry knowledge, scale, and obviously tech, was a game-changer for us. I felt like I was honoring my ambition of being the most influential [agency]. Independence was secondary.”  

By the time it absorbed Droga5, Accenture had already acquired a number of design agencies, most notably global design agency Fjord in 2013. Accenture’s interactive unit was already capitalizing on chief marketing officers’ growing need for technology and analytics to support digital marketing campaigns; the acquisition of Fjord and other creative firms offered Accenture a chance to be more than a tech partner. “You get to be the tip of the spear, the front end of the whole development cycle,” says Andy Zimmerman, cofounder and CEO of global design studio Journey, who helped build Accenture Interactive.  

The resulting whole appears to be greater than the sum of its parts—at least in clients’ eyes. When Australia’s NRMA Insurance was looking for a firm to help reimagine its customer experience, chief customer and marketing officer Michelle Klein says she was drawn to Accenture Song’s collection of marketing, digital, design, and communications expertise—and she called out the its top-tier creative talent. “There’s Neil Heymann, a renowned chief creative officer, who also thinks digitally, and then there’s David Droga himself, the ultimate creative,” Klein says, noting that Heymann, Droga, and Nick Law, another Accenture Song creative executive working on the project, all happen to be Australian. And indeed, a significant part of the project, which rolled out last July, has showed Song’s creativity at work: The team helped reposition the insurer as “A Help Company,” with a new visual identity and television commercials set to a cover of the Beatles song “Help!”  
 
Still, Klein underscores that it was Song’s breadth that won the day. “It wasn’t about a creative pitch,” Klein says. “It was more like, ‘What business problem are we trying to solve?’ It’s pretty sizable when you think about the transformation plus the component parts that need to be part of that. We were seeking a partnership that could look at it holistically and translate it into a seamless customer experience.” 

Synergy leads to success

Song’s “end-to-end” competencies also appeal to corporate technologists, many of whom are undertaking multiple and complex digital transformation projects. Three years ago, luxury fashion house Prada Group began rebuilding its omnichannel platform—the software that it uses to connect with customers across all touch points—with a focus on e-commerce. “This is where we first teamed up with Accenture Song,” says Cristiano Agostini, Prada’s chief information officer (CIO). “Why them? Because we felt the need [for] a single partner that could help us to drive both the technology and the consumer interaction.”  

Journey CEO Zimmerman notes that Accenture is particularly well positioned to help marketers and CIOs understand how to use and deploy generative artificial intelligence tools to create and personalize messages and experiences for their customers. “As marketing plays an increasingly important role in technology innovation and management, Accenture Song helps a marketing partner with its company’s technology infrastructure, while a more traditional IT consultancy lacks the creative cred that an Accenture Song provides,” he says. 

Song’s packaging of technology and creative services makes it hard to know exactly how much creativity directly contributes to Accenture’s $64.9 billion in fiscal 2024 revenue. The unit’s $19 billion in annual revenue includes “overlap” across different departments, so revenue from one client engagement might be included in multiple areas. 

So while Song’s Droga5 or other agencies may compete with the big advertising holding companies and independents for certain things, “most of agencies’ businesses are not directly competitive with most of Accenture Song’s revenue base,” notes Brian Wieser, CEO of Madison and Wall, an advisory firm servicing media and technology companies.  

Inspiration, not disruption

When I asked Sweet to share an example of how Droga has influenced her leadership team to think differently or more creatively, her response was more about inspiration than disruption. She recalled a recent leadership meeting where executives spoke about the role Accenture plays for its clients, especially as Accenture and its clients alike grapple with the rise of generative AI (gen AI). Droga gave impassioned remarks that “got at the essence of what we do and how we appeal at an emotional level to both our people and our clients,” she says. “He was able to articulate it in a way that had us leaving that room much more aligned and inspired. That can’t be done by someone [who’s] just a good marketing person. Because it came from him being side-by-side in the trenches, rolling up his sleeves, a leader like everyone else, bringing a perspective on what we’re doing; it was just incredibly powerful.”  

While it may be hard to quantify the impact creativity is having on Accenture’s top line or culture, there’s little question that the creative professionals who come to Song have access to a set of tools and knowledge that boutiques and even large holding companies lack.  

“Sometimes the first thing I’ll do when I’m recruiting someone or we’ve just brought someone in is introduce them to people,” Droga says. “They’ve probably never crossed paths with experts such as the people who are heading up our gen AI group, people who have written white papers, who have patents. Their reference points are very different, but they’re excited to meet each other, and when they realize how they’re helping each other, it just opens the aperture.”  

Navigating new terrain

Sean Lyons, the former global CEO of RG/A who now is global practices lead for Song and a member of Sweet’s executive leadership team, acknowledges that Accenture initially can be a hard place for creatives to navigate. “Creatives are not a native species of Accenture,” he says. But he notes that the breadth of the firm’s clients and the complexity of their challenges gives creative professionals a variety of challenges to tackle. “There’s many ways to ply your craft.” 

I asked Jill Kramer, Accenture’s chief marketing and communications officer, how she would pitch Song to her fellow CMOs. She replied: “The big thing is that they can deliver everything they dream up.”  

That may be part of the reason Song has been able to attract executives such as Lyons and retain talent such as Olof Schybergson, the founder of Fjord. (Notable departures include Susie Nam and Tim Gordon, who’d served as CEO, Americas, and chief creative officer of Droga5, respectively. Droga chalks up the turnover to “natural attrition.”) For all the talk of technology at Song, the company continues to win creative awards. Song and its agencies won 11 Cannes Lions awards last year and 17 Red Dot awards. 

Making creativity profitable 

Has the presence of creative leaders changed Accenture—or has Accenture changed what it means to be a creative? Lyons believes creatives are effecting change at Accenture. “We help humanize the technology,” he says. “It’s often about the ideation that comes behind these new technologies. That’s not always something we’re thinking about at Accenture broadly but is part of Song’s role—to think about how these things can be used and developed.”  

And there’s no doubt that Droga, the ultimate creative, has made his mark. His Accenture colleagues I spoke with went out of their way to praise him for his business savvy. KC McClure was chief financial officer of Accenture when the company acquired Droga5. (McClure retired in December.) “My role as CFO was to go through the financials and make sure it was a good business case,” she says. “David is obviously unbelievable in that creative capacity, but he built a great business. He brings a lot of things to our meetings, but he also is a very good business operator.” Sweet says a story about a meeting early in his tenure at Accenture Interactive where Droga asked the creative agencies about their win rate spread “like wildfire” at Accenture because it established his bonafides as an executive. “He is both a creative and a business builder,” she says. “I’m sure that was not an accident that the first thing he did at his meeting was to establish that we don’t make an impact if we don’t win.” 
 
More than three years into his CEO role, Droga still senses that many observers are watching to see whether the notion of elevating a creative to corporate leadership was in fact, to quote his initial reaction, ridiculous. “Such is my belief in creativity that I want to build a very, very robust business around it,” he says. In the corporate world, the best way to show the power of creativity is to make it profitable. 

Do creatives have a seat at your leadership table? 

Does your organization have creatives in leadership? If so, how does that affect your business and its decision-making process? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Drop me a note at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I may use your experiences in a future newsletter. 

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