BBDO New York executive vice president, group planning director Deepthi Prakash has become the latest agency veteran to depart for a consultancy with her arrival at Accenture as a managing director.
Prakash first arrived at BBDO as a senior vice president, group planning director in May of 2015, following a brief stint as a group planning director with Havas. Before that she spent over ten years with Ogilvy & Mather New York, working her way up from planner to senior partner, group planning director before leaving for Havas in the summer of 2014.
She’d worked on the AT&T business before joining fellow Ogilvy veterans like global head of digital content Donna Tuth on the Accenture team.
This is only the latest move in the consultancy world’s extended efforts to pick off agency talent and, subsequently, win more of their business as well.
Accenture and other consultancies have been honing in on agency business for some time. This past November, Accenture acquired independent, London-based agency Karmarama, while Deloitte purchased San Francisco agency Heat a little less than a year ago. Both consultancies have been poaching talent like Prakash from agencies for the past several years, including Accenture’s hiring of DigitasLBi veteran Greg Kaplan as CCO in December of 2015, SapientNitro vice president, global digital marketing and brand content Alan Schulman leaving the agency to become national director of content marketing and creative experience at Deloitte Digital in June of 2015 and R/GA managing director Robyn Freye leaving for consultancy firm The Burnett Collective this past October.
Most recently, former Rosetta CEO Tammy Soares became West Coast lead at Accenture Interactive earlier this month after a long series of changes at the Publicis unit. As AdExchanger put it, “Agencies and consultancies are looking more and more alike.”