Deloitte Australia takes growing piece of digital campaign business

Frank Farrall, national leader of online consulting practice at Deloitte Australia, said the Deloitte network (Deloitte is not a single company but a network of affiliated consulting and business-service providers) has seen an increase of 25 per cent for its mobile development offering since the launch of the campaign support services.

Mobile engagements are the primary driver for the campaign support services offering. Services include launching apps and other digital projects for clients.

“It is an example of business model change in the digital era, and we provide value-added services such as campaign support, end-to-end digital solutions and strategy to clients,” Farral told Campaign Asia-Pacific.

Deloitte, known as one of the 'Big Four' professional services providers along with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Ernst & Young, and KPMG, is active in 150 countries. It offers audit, tax, consulting, enterprise risk and financial advisory services.

Prior to offering digital campaign support, its online consulting division delivered only digital strategy and technical implementation services. Deloitte Australia began to offer digital campaign support in 2009, with the launch of the Vote Victoria iPhone app, as the government wanted maximum awareness of the app in the lead up to the state election the next year.

Besides providing information on the election, the iPhone app also displayed real-time first preference vote counts for voters to keep track of the counting progress.

Campaign support service has since become a standard part of most of Deloitte's mobile apps projects, Farral said. Deloitte has worked with clients such as Telstra, Australia Post and Bankwest, and recently launched a rich-media platform for Australia Army.

The online consulting division has more than 150 employees including creative designers, channel strategists, engineers and architects. These professionals focus on internet, intranet and multi-channel strategies; customer experience design; social-media strategies; mobile applications development; digital technology architecture and implementation.

“Clients are asking for launch planning advice and support in driving adoption of their apps in the market, such as knowing their target audience, how to best get word out about their apps and how to make the app go viral,” Farrall said.

“Often their in-house PR teams don’t understand the dynamics of the mobile apps market and making a message go viral, have limited coverage in social networks or tend to be defensive in nature and not proactive.”

In January of this year, Deloitte boosted its mobile-related services, after it US Technology Consulting acquired Übermind, a specialist mobile user experience and application development agency.

Janet Foutty, national managing director, technology at Deloitte Consulting, noted that the acquisition combines the creative and technical strengths of both organisations to bring depth and scale to digital strategy, design, engineering and integration for the marketplace.