How CEO Brian Whipple Transformed Accenture Interactive

How brian Whipple transformed Accenture interactive into a marketing leader for the digital age.

- Richard C. Morais

Brian Whipple, the longtime CEO of Accenture Interactive, loves fishing; casting his lure into deep waters of the Atlantic. 

And from his Boston office, where since 2010 he’s run the world’s largest digital agency—to the tune of $6.5 billion in revenue in 2017—he’s reeled in some pretty big clients, overseen dozens of acquisitions and more recently, this summer, made big waves with the announcement that Accenture Interactive would offer marketers in-house programmatic services.

Yet Whipple is not your garden-variety consultant. Yes, he grew up in the firm, starting his career there in 1987 and spending the next 18 years building up a knowledge base and Rolodex. But by 2005, he moved on to the agency world, with senior leadership roles at RAPP and Hill Holiday. It was here in agency-land where he saw an opportunity—and the future.

“There was little talk, but no action, about the intersection of marketing and technology,” Whipple remembers. “The broader things of connectivity, mobility, the internet was not leveraged in a scalable way for marketing. It was more systems integration. Things were just beginning to wake up in this intersection.”

This intersection, he realized, was coming to a crossroads sooner rather than later. And in a bit of serendipity, Accenture was looking for an executive to lead its fledgling digital-marketing venture; one who was part business strategist, part ad executive and who could talk directly to the CMOs like the consulting firm was already talking to CIOs.

So the big consultancy called Whipple.

“I was interested in growing a scalable business in the billions, not in the millions,” he says of his decision to move over. “And while I am a big fan of various agencies, and the agency culture … they are by their very nature, intrinsically nonscalable.”