e3 eyes ‘new consultancy model’ with London Strategy Unit majority stake

It’s a small but fast growing space, and both e3 and LSU believe growing pressure on marketers to make a commercial difference to their businesses will open up even further opportunities.

It has already floated the proposition past some clients, having fine-tuned the offering over the last six months. Moving forward, both e3 and LSU will keep their separate brands, though will come together for specific projects, which will usually see them work directly with C-suite executives.

While both businesses have experience at this level in the past, primarily offering consultancy services, the revamped offer will bring the implementation of technology into those discussions now.

“It’s no longer possible for companies to grow by running a new brief to a new agency. It requires a much deeper and broader level of thinking to address those challenges,” said Matt Boffey, founder of LSU.

There are pretenders out there that have a similar pitch, he continued, though many won’t be able to make the strategy recommendations and then be able to carry those out in the same way his new venture could. His rationale being that LSU has processes and methodologies in place, all geared around so-called sprint cycles of quick projects that are designed to generate results.

“Digital agencies like e3 would have delivered these projects but what we weren’t able to do was drive that cultural change that enables brands to create the products and services they really want,” added Neil Collard, e3’s managing director.

“Big networks too often default to the 30-second TV ad and big consultancies are geared to sell big IT deployments which, they argue, will give you the platform to achieve innovation. However driven by technology, consumer behaviour is changing too quickly for either models to deliver change fast enough. e3 and LSU are a more flexible, pacier alternative for brands that want to achieve growth through digital transformation.”

e3's remuneration for such projects with LSU is similar to arrangements at other agencies. But there are ways the agency would like to work more collaboratively with clients such as shared IP or shared revenue and yet there aren’t many organisations that are willing to have that conversation, admitted Boffey.

“It’s uncharted territory for many organisations…When you’re working with clients and they’re saying we need to deliver and innovate now and show that their organisation can grow, a conversation about revenue share around those innovations is time-consuming."

The initiative is the latest in a swarm of alternative agency models being formed by former ad-land executives.

Adam Graham and David Jones, who were previously at Omnicom and Havas respectively, are pursuing their own ventures and embarking on aggressive acquisition sprees to snap up agencies that can further their own models, which in turn are trying to monetise the buzzword of the moment – digital transformation. e3 is no different and has its eye on other businesses that could enhance its offering as it believes LSU will do.

Stuart Avery, chair and co-founder of e3, explained: "This is the first of several investments we hope to make. We want to add further depth to our data intelligence capabilities as well as extending our existing experience with IBM Watson and AI.”