Our next Google Firestarters London is upon us and we've got a great theme and speakers lined up for this one. We will be taking as our subject 'Consultancies, Customer Experience and Convergence', looking at how the big consultancies are increasingly clashing with the most forward thinking agencies, most notably around the area of customer experience.
When I did the research for the Future of Agencies report I noted how consultancies and systems integrators, schooled in business consultancy, organisational design, and technology, are expanding their capability (through development, hiring and acquisition) into customer experience, user experience, service design, product innovation and even more traditional areas of digital design. Meanwhile larger agency groups are developing new skills in digital transformation, technology and data, also through development or acquisition, taking them further upstream with clients.
There are challenges here around legacy (relationships, capability), credibility (once you get bought for one thing in a company it's difficult to move outside of that), and culture (can consultancies really house creative talent?), but also plenty of opportunity (new client engagements, remuneration opportunities). And plenty of interesting stuff to talk about at our event so we'll be considering what this means in terms of shifting client engagements, ways of working, and agency and planning capability.
We have three exceptional speakers lined up:
Cheyney Robinson, Chief Experience Officer, EMEA and APAC at Isobar and former Chief Creative Officer, Europe, IBM Interactive Experience
James Haycock, Founder at AdaptiveLab
Patricia McDonald, Chief Strategy Officer, Isobar
It will be on Monday 7th March, 6pm at Google HQ London. We're already pretty much full up for the event but I've held a couple of guest passes back for readers of this blog so if you'd like one drop me a note.
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