Accenture has appointed Haydn Townsend to head Accenture Interactive in Africa, a new breed of agency that is digitally-focused, experience-led and engineered around experiences and outcomes.
Vukani Mngxati, Chief Executive Officer of Accenture in Africa said, ‘It gives me great pleasure to announce the appointment of Townsend. He is an exceptional leader with solid cross-functional marketing and advertising experience in areas such as brand management, sales, activations, digital, social and sponsorship.’
Townsend’s career spans value contribution in various leading management roles on both client-side and in the agency world. Prior to joining Accenture Interactive, he was the Group CEO for Wunderman Thompson. He has worked at Multichoice, Warner-Lambert, Pfizer, GHFM and others before crossing the floor to Ogilvy, The Jupiter Drawing Room and Aquaonline – to mention a few, in the past 25 years.
‘I’m excited to be part of the Accenture Interactive business, where I’ll be able to focus more on innovative experiences, tapping into the scale of our parent company and building consumer-facing digital and communication offers for brands,’ said Townsend.
‘What fascinates me about Accenture Interactive is the fact that its offerings speak to what today’s CMOs need. In the past, the biggest lever we could pull in the marketing mix was communication. Whilst it certainly hasn’t died, we have seen brands that offer better consumer experiences delivering greater ROI. Accenture Interactive owns the customer experience space and believe the digital transformation, done right, requires overall business transformation. This is what the future looks like today,’ added Townsend.
Mngxati stated that the future of business will be more driven by experiences and new ways of engaging with customers. ‘It has been critical for us to strongly focus on design and experience-led capability. This has been affirmed through some of the acquisitions we made globally in the past,’ said Mngxati.
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