Unlimited Potential – The Agency Group Thriving Under Accenture Song

UNLIMITED is riding the crest of a wave right now, and there are no signs of that slowing
down anytime soon. The business has just picked up the McDonald's customer relationship
management account for the UK and Ireland, continuing a hot streak on the new business front.

The group consists of integrated creative agency TMW, Walnut, UNLIMITED’s market
research agency, B2B communications and content marketing agency, Nelson Bostock, and healthcare comms agency Health Unlimited. UNLIMITED is being integrated to scale Accenture Song's Al abilities and underline its evolving creative credentials.

Until early this year, a case could be made for the group being unintentionally one of the
best-kept secrets in the advertising community despite it being 38 years old, employing over 600 people, winning numerous awards and working for clients such as the Cabinet Office, Canon and Vodafone.

Last year, TMW alone won 24 pitches, totaling £7.9 million in new revenue, including Suzuki, Oak Furnitureland, People's Postcode Lottery and Rail Delivery Group.

But in April, things certainly changed when the group was acquired by one of the world’s
largest business consultancies, Accenture, to become part of its creative arm, Accenture Song, which has heightened its new business pipeline even further due to its substantially strengthened offer.

Tony Walford, founder of Green Square which handles mergers and acquisitions, describes
the deal as having “a smart rationale” that will bring “specialist elements to Accenture Song's broader offer.”

Now, the group sits proudly alongside major agency names such as Droga5. Within just six
months the acquisition has already begun to bear fruit having just won McDonald’s CRM account, something it would have been unlikely to have achieved without the collective might of its new parent company.

Michelle Graham-Clare, CMO UK and Ireland for McDonald’s UK and Ireland says of the hire: “TMW demonstrated a true passion for our brand. Their use of customer data, strategic thinking, as well as creativity was exceptional and we look forward to utilising this partnership as a way to build world-class CRM that delights our customers at every touchpoint.”

Ambitious Leadership

Chris Mellish, group chief executive of UNLIMITED, sees the move as part of the leadership
team’s collective drive to take on the traditional agency networks from which many of them
have heralded. Mellish, who always comes across as a calm and approachable leader, has a great ambition for UNLIMITED’s progress.

A former president of BIMA, Mellish has spent more than two decades developing digital
marketing solutions. He joined the business in 2019 from Razorfish where he spent 14
years, to become the chief executive of TMW before being promoted to lead UNLIMITED last year.

UNLIMITED has a clear point of difference, he believes, through its modern integrated offer alongside its deeper understanding of consumers through behavioural and neuroscience as part of its Human Understanding Lab launched in 2022.

“Five years ago, we made the decision to put PhD-level thinking at the heart of everything we do and combine that with our unique perspective on integrating the customer journey. It’s really struck a chord with the market and we’ve seen an incredible period of growth.”

That has been exemplified in Accenture Song being named on McDonald’s CRM Agency
Roster, with TMW leading the pitch in the UK and Ireland, subsequently becoming the first
agency appointed as part of the global roster review. Accenture offered scale and expertise to support the process, but TMW led on both creative and strategy.

Mellish explains that the proposition around “true integration” was something he held a
strong belief in when it came to delivering stronger customer engagement calendars “more
inspiring” and integrated campaigns “more effective” for clients. Now, he feels that is self-
evident following the positive response by the McDonald’s team.

“This was our first opportunity to pitch alongside the rest of the Accenture Song, and it has
demonstrated immediately the scale and potency that we have added to each other’s
offerings,” he continues.

Break On Through

Debut campaigns for new clients have been released in recent months, showcasing an evolution in strength. That included TMW’s first work for Suzuki offering a very different type of car ad. Its campaign was designed to help the Suzuki Swift stand out against ‘increasingly formulaic ads’, presenting the different lengths that owners would go to just to keep the car from growing in popularity.

The creative agency also supported the launch of on demand TV service Freely, from BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5 and the “Enhance Performance, Legally” campaign for sports nutrition brand Bulk which proved deliberately provocative.
Elsewhere, through its long-standing consortium with Pablo, the first campaign was released to help ‘humanise’ HMRC under the ‘You're On It’ platform. Released in November, it highlights the British tax authority's ambition to increase the number of users of its app to six million people.

That consortium was also appointed to take on the Government's key climate account earlier this year. Described as “The Breakthrough Agenda” it saw UNLIMITED beat out rostered agencies on the Government communications framework to be appointed as the agency of record for The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero‘s initiative, which aims to strengthen international collaborations around clean technology development and sustainable solutions.

The brief includes website design and development, social strategy, and content creation
and PR around key periods, managed by bespoke specialists across the network agencies,
including TMWX, TMW Tomorrow and Nelson Bostock.

Mellish believes that clients have bought into how it helps brands manage their communications efficiently and effectively through a simple ‘honed down’ approach that they understand, while the positive culture around the business that talked about driving performance and effectiveness also resonated.

And now his challenge is to integrate that all within Accenture Song while building scale, without losing those core, appealing strengths.

“Together, we are building a new agency model that enhances our ability to deliver comprehensive, elevated solutions that better serve our client's evolving needs,” he states enthusiastically.”

Mellish is relishing taking the offer and working alongside the established parts of Accenture Song to move beyond its UK-centric footprint and build further. He describes the breadth of the business as “enormous” - a word he also uses to describe the new opportunities.

With Accenture’s backing, UNLIMITED has also considerably strengthened its technological capabilities.

“The most topical example is probably AI, where billions are being invested, and the breadth and depth of expertise throughout Accenture is incredible. Since becoming part of Song, we’re now lucky to have access to world-leading experts across every specialism or technology you could ever think of.”

Subsequently, Mellish is now part of the Accenture Song leadership team reporting into
Sohel Aziz, the managing director for UK, Ireland and Africa.

Clear Signs Of Progress

The McDonald’s win is a clear sign of UNLIMITED’s progress as it competes for what Mellish sees as being “more innovative briefs” with the Accenture Song fold. He sees bigger brands and a bigger scale prove exciting for the team, with early evidence that the mix is working.

“We’ve had a huge wave of success over the past few years, but we’re now working on certain briefs that we simply wouldn’t have seen before. It’s exciting thar our big ambitions have started to become reality almost immediately. McDonald’s is the perfect case in point. The response from staff has been amazing – our employee engagement numbers have got even better this year.”

Speaking to Creative Salon when the acquisition was announced in April, Dame Annette
King said that UNLIMITED had proven in recent years to be “one of the industry's strongest offerings across the board.”

She continues: “Their capabilities and expertise have driven incredible performance for their clients - all of which has been underpinned by a culture where people genuinely love where they work and are proud of the work they put out in the world. Their unique skill sets are complementary to what we already have at Song but what was evident from the outset was how these could be supercharged by what we do. Particularly when it comes to our Gen Al offering that we know is a central focus for clients everywhere.”

Moving forward, Mellish intends to ensure that more brands experience the capabilities of the group. “We’ve already built an approach that drives both great creativity and real business results for our clients. With this bigger platform, I’m excited that many more brands will get the opportunity to see that firsthand.”