AKQA: Inside WPP's introverted powerhouse

Paige Murphy
By Paige Murphy | 10 March 2021
 
Brian Vella

As consolidations continue within the world’s largest advertising and communications holding company WPP, there has been a clear trend towards it grouping agencies together under its strongest brands.

While it may not be big in the awards circuit or regular in industry news touting its own work, design and innovation agency AKQA has been a thriving, albeit more introverted, powerhouse for WPP over the years.

Despite being quieter in the public eye, a series of mergers and acquisitions have highlighted the strength the holding company sees in the brand - especially over the last year where there has been more demand for digital transformation and help to design a holistic customer journey.

AKQA APAC managing partner Brian Vella tells AdNews, he boils the success down to its digital-first nature.

“It is one of the stronger businesses in the WPP group globally, but I would say we’re probably even stronger in Australia and New Zealand,” Vella says.

“It’s a very mature company now. We’ve been going since 1996 and we started as a digital business, so that’s a long time to be in the digital game.

“I find it fascinating that there’s still so much emphasis on the word digital even though we have been at it for nearly 25 years.”

AKQA brings together both designers and technologists under one roof equally to design digital experiences for its clients.

Vella says this has put the business in a fortunate position, particularly over the last year.

“Now COVID’s come along and if anything has only accelerated the move towards more digital experiences and channels and services,” he says.

“We talk about ourselves as being the architects of future brand experiences. Anywhere there’s a touchpoint with a brand, we would like to think that our skills that we have are transferable and we can design that experience better than most.”

Offering clients everything from service, product and spatial design to making the Australian Open more accessible for the blind and vision impaired, he says AKQA’s culture fosters technologists and designers to come together and create unique and holistic experiences as part of the customer journey.

“Customer journeys have been quite fashionable the last three or four years, but it goes back to our roots,” he says.

Making a powerhouse
AKQA technically landed in Australia in 2017 as part of a merger with local digital agency DT which Vella was a part of. The move saw it open offices in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore at the time.

Vella, who began at DT 20 years ago, says after a strong year in 2016 for the the agency he was looking for its next step when the opportunity arose.

“I remember at the time thinking, well the landscape is changing and how will we continue to compete and ensure we develop career opportunities for our team,” he says.

“The beat that we were really missing was the global scale and the network. AKQA has always been a business that I had respected.”

Since then, the team has tripled in size and expanded its capabilities following a series of other mergers and acquisitions including most recently with Ikon Communications.

The merger saw the formation of AKQA Media and further expanded its digital media and performance capabilities following the merger 2019 merger with Switched On Media.

“It’s given us even greater breadth and depth of talent and it’s allowed us to create more of these connected brand experiences,” Vella says.

With Ikon and Switched On both having strong digital focuses as well, Vella says these businesses were a natural fit to join the AKQA family.

At the start of last year, the business also expanded its footprint in New Zealand with the M&A of martech company Dominion.

The agency already had a 60-strong team in Auckland, but the acquisition of Dominion brought in an additional 40 team members and a new Wellington office.

Perhaps one of the most interesting global mergers for the business to date though, has been with legacy brand Grey.

WPP announced it would be retiring the brand and rolling it into AKQA.

In the local market, it became the second merger for whiteGREY, which brought together The White Agency and Grey back in 2017.

Vella says AKQA co-founder and global CEO Ajaz Ahmed was quick to remind the team that the addition of the Grey brand under AKQA was a “long-term play”.

“[He said] it’s not about how quickly we can make this happen if this is the direction we’re going with,” Vella says.

“Grey’s a business that is over 100 years old. We don’t need to rush and turn it on its head on day one. It will be something that we work on throughout the year.”

Like the other M&As, Vella sees whiteGREY as a complementary fit with AKQA adding a more digitally-focused creative agency perspective to the mix.

In terms of adding other capabilities like PR and traditional media though, he says they will continue to leverage the other brands across the group instead of building them within AKQA.

“Where we have gaps, for example with traditional media or PR, we’ll continue to work with the broader WPP group,” he says.

“We don’t want to become a WPP on our own, but I think we are certainly stitching more together where it makes sense to deliver on. For those brand experiences, I think the more we’re connecting things that make sense, the better.”

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