As agencies find themselves up against tech services giants like IBM, Accenture, Sapient and Deloitte, they are being asked to deliver:

• Marketing and business strategy based on deep data.  No marketing strategy is competitive today without the strength of managing and interpreting data. Both firms have invested in disparate platforms to build insight into the planning process.
• Technology driven ad management.  With Starcom MediaVest – a lean-forward thinker in the media space – at the helm of the technology platforms to improve buying power, Publicis Omnicom will accelerate the programmatic efficiency of digital into all media types.
• Competitive customer-facing systems. Most of the systems integrators went into digital to build eCommerce and CRM systems. But the end client for these efforts is typically the CMO, with the CIO making the linkages to internal systems. As these two executives merge their strategies together to drive digital business, the agencies have a leg up on the relationships, but need the scale to be competitive on the implementation front.
• Channel agnostic, or channel complementary, creative juices. Clients have been adding more agencies to their rosters lately, and managing them as a bundle of idea generators and execution teams. A bigger holding company can pitch the benefits of more alignment of best of breed agencies to retain more of these niche relationships.