Accenture alumnus launches Flipside to issue 'digital transformation' challenge to ad land
Former Accenture consultant Nick Parminter and ad veteran Ben Langdon have teamed up to launch Flipside, a digital transformation agency they believe can offer greater effectiveness at lesser expense between the goliath clashes of the holding groups and consultancy agencies.
(left to right) Arvid Brobeck, Alastair Cottrill, Nick Parminter, and Ashley Webster
Nick Parminter, previously of Accenture and EY Seren, and industry veteran Ben Langdon, who has clocked in time at EY, Collett Dickenson Pearce and McCann Worldgroup, have co-founded the new digital proposition based in London.
Langdon said it will issue a “challenge” to existing agency and consultancy models.
He said: “Clients are often being forced to pay for fake IP and formulaic process, as well as the unnecessary bureaucracy and overheads inherent in large organisations. Current client experience can be the opposite of transformative. It’s actually more often slow, expensive, and unproductive.”
Parminter added: “We’ve all witnessed the unhealthy convergence of design agencies and traditional consultancies – and the broken incentives and expensive failures that it has yielded. Too often clients are paying through the nose for frameworks, reports, processes, and ‘journey maps’ that lead them on a path to nowhere – all in the promise of ‘transformation’. Most consultancies and agencies that we’ve worked with and for would favour a £60m failure over a £1m success.
“Despite preaching business model reinvention, most of these firms are so poorly designed that only a relatively small proportion of client spend hits the target and changes things.
“Our clients want to change themselves to keep up with the world around them. We believe the only successful route to achieving that level of change is by organising diverse and senior talent in bespoke programmes that embrace legacy challenges and act as an extension of their business. And this change needs to come from the very top. We’ve designed the organisation, team, and technology that allows us to do that at scale. Our ambition is to become a viable, better-value alternative to the biggest consultancies, and our early projects have given us a lot of confidence in our ability to achieve that.”
Joining the agency is Alastair Cottrill, formerly of EY Seren, Arvid Brobeck of Digitas UK and Ashley Webster, a business development director from Lippincott.
The agency has been in the works for the last year and is now gearing up for an official launch.
It will announce a high street bank as a client in the first quarter of the year.