Winter
We started off the year by heading to CES in Las Vegas—the world’s largest tradeshow for consumer technology and innovation, with more than 150,000 attendees from 150 countries. We moderated and spoke at several panels, ranging from The Future of Artificial Intelligence to Consumers and the Rise of Shared Mobility.
We kicked off our very first annual NextGen CMO Academy at Deloitte University in January. Thirty-three CMOs from around the U.S. joined us for the three-day interactive training event on effective marketing leadership. Our CMO efforts made a big splash all year, with Deloitte announcing its sponsorship of “CMO Today” from The Wall Street Journal, providing a regular stream of CMO-focused content including research, perspectives, insights, and technical analyses. And Deloitte’s CMO Diana O’Brien was named one of the 50 most innovative CMOs by Business Insider.
At the hybris 2016 Partner Summit in Munich, Germany, we were recognized as the 2015 Americas Partner of the Year for our support of SAP’s vision for customer engagement. In case you didn’t know, hybris is an SAP company that helps deliver state-of-the-art customer data management, context driven marketing tools and unified commerce processes.
In February, we surprised (almost) everyone with our announcement that we acquired Heat, an internationally recognized, award-winning advertising agency in San Francisco. The acquisition marked the launch of the world’s first creative digital consultancy, combining Deloitte’s technical experience, deep business strategy, and industry knowledge with the creative and digital capabilities of our studios and the broad reach of an advertising agency. We like being the first to do things, and this approach will likely reshape the consulting and advertising industries for years to come.
And speaking of the coming years, the Internet of Things (IoT) is bringing about a major transformation in business, and Deloitte Digital’s IoT practice is at the head of it. In February, ALM Intelligence released a report naming Deloitte a leader in IoT consulting, and Gartner named Deloitte an IoT service provider aligned with IoT practice leader characteristics. The IoT team got out front and center at events around the world this year, including IoT World, Liveworx, Maximize, VMworld, and IoT World Congress, helping clients find value and opportunities in IoT.
Always thinking about the future, we launched our Tech Trends 2016 report, which identified eight themes that are likely to disrupt businesses in the next couple of years, from augmented reality and the IoT, to socially responsible applications of technology.
In March, we headed to SXSW Interactive as a major sponsor, where we explored the future of music and interaction with the super-cool installation, the Audience Reactive Composition (ARC). The ARC was a compilation of five musical instruments that Deloitte Digital built in collaboration with renowned technologists Gabe Liberti and David Rife (collectively Dave & Gabe) and famous musicians, including Grammy-nominee André Anjos of RAC. The interactive project got a ton of media coverage, and we had a blast in Austin hosting clients, colleagues and friends.
Spring
Heading into the spring season, we traveled to Adobe Summit, where our Adobe alliance team shared insights and practices on today’s world of digital marketing, spoke at sessions, presented a virtual reality demo, and, of course, played many games of foosball hosted by our IoT team. We also launched MarketMix for Media, a new solution to help media and entertainment companies launch and manage direct-to-consumer video streaming services. And, we may have also thrown an amazing throwback retro party for our colleagues and friends, featuring the one and only Tone Loc.
In May, our fearless leader Andy Main, head of Deloitte Digital, was named one of “Top 25 Consultants” by Consulting magazine for leading the way with the new creative digital consultancy model. In June, our advertising agency Heat won a Cannes Lion in Creative Effectiveness, continuing their streak of creative awards and recognition. (Last year, Heat won eight Lions for their Madden NFL 15 campaign). Also in June, thousands of our professionals spent the day volunteering for nonprofit organizations for our annual Impact Day and had a blast doing it.
Summer
At Deloitte Digital, we are known for pursuing our artistic, athletic, and foodie passions both in and out of the studio, and that’s why we sponsored the one-of-a-kind Divide Music Festival at Winter Park, Colorado. Combining three days of live music, craft beer, and camping set against the Colorado Rockies backdrop, the Divide Music Festival was a must-attend event of the summer. We had a great time and met a ton of awesome people.
Deloitte was a major sponsor of the U.S. Open at Oakmont in Pennsylvania, and the digital team from the NYC studio transformed the golf swing into art. In tandem with Deloitte’s latest advertising campaign “Look Again,” created by our colleagues at Heat, we teed up (pun intended) a unique interactive experience called “Signature Swing: The art and science of the swing.” The installation gave our guests the chance to take a whack at the perfect swing using a golf club embedded with sensors that measure the trajectory, height, length, arc, and precise spot where the club face meets the ball.
In early September, we headed to Cologne, Germany, for DMEXCO, Europe’s largest digital marketing conference, where Deloitte Digital CMO Alicia Hatch spoke on a panel about the future of artificial intelligence and also ate a lot of schnitzel, although not at the same time.
Autumn
In September, we traveled to the Apple campus in Cupertino to announce our partnership with Apple to help our clients transform their enterprise with iOS. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO said, "As the leader in digital transformation strategy, Deloitte is an ideal partner that brings a team of Apple-dedicated strategic advisors to help clients truly revolutionize how they work using iOS, iPhone and iPad." As part of the partnership, we established a new Apple practice with 5,000 trained iOS specialists to lead accelerator workshops, help clients identify areas of opportunity using industry-specific value maps for iOS, and create best practices for enterprise iOS mobile solutions. We’re also working with Apple to launch a new offering called EnterpriseNext—a set of tools and workshops designed to accelerate the process of ideation, prototyping, and evaluating mobile opportunities for iPhone and iPad.
We headed to Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco to speak at several sessions, then we were off to Dreamforce, where we won a Salesforce Partner Innovation Award for our work in financial services. With a record 170,000 attendees (holy smokes!), the Deloitte Digital team was out in full force, with members from more than 30 countries in attendance, bringing our unique perspective to several speaking sessions. We also hosted an amazing concert by X Ambassadors at the legendary Fillmore for our employees, clients, and colleagues.
Heat + Deloitte Digital teamed up to represent big at several advertising and marketing events in the fall, including participating in the panels “The Great Debate: Agencies vs. Consultancies” and “Branding Without Boundaries” at Advertising Week and in a workshop on marketing and VIP dinner with Advertising Age at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference. Deloitte Digital also sponsored the Advertising Week Brand Genius Awards and Andy Main had the distinct honor of announcing the “Grand Brand Genius” winner, Elizabeth Windram of JetBlue. (Did we mention Arnold Schwarzenegger was there?) We also sponsored the Ad Age Brand Summit, where Heat presented on their innovative work with Hotwire.
We spent several days in November at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, where more than 50,000 tech CEOs, founders, startups, investors, celebrities, and political leaders came together to look for answers to the questions posed by the tech revolution we live in, to share ideas, and to get inspired. We had four of our leaders emcee the marketing, enterprise, creative, and IoT stages and we also hosted two workshops - one on designing new realities in AR and VR and one on smart identities for smarter customer relationships – and participated on the "Smart Identities: Real-world Cases" panel. We also hosted a lively dinner for our clients and the media. Check out the photos from the event.
In December, CMO Alicia Hatch gave the opening keynote at the iMedia Agency Summit in Scottsdale, and then we headed to the Salesforce World Tour New York to speak at sessions, where Janet Foutty, chairman and CEO, Deloitte Consulting LLP, was a keynote guest speaker and panelist.
Icing on the cake? We were recognized by Gartner as a leader in Customer Experience and CRM for the fifth year in a row, and also a global leader in Digital Innovation Consulting by ALM Intelligence. Not too shabby.
And we’re only getting better.
As a leader in all aspects of the digital market, Deloitte Digital is growing like crazy. We’re delivering digital everywhere, from Toyko to Toledo, Singapore to Stockholm, Warsaw to Wichita, and just this year opened studios in Luxembourg, Malta, Spain, Mexico, and Israel. And in the spirit of collaboration, we joined two of our Seattle studios – Pioneer Square and Fremont – into one this year. The new downtown office is a state-of-the-art creative studio designed by Gensler architects, working closely with our team in Seattle. The new studio designs will be heading to New York City, Chicago, and Austin next.
And last but not least, Deloitte Digital was just named one of Crain’s New York’s Best Places to Work 2016. Is it any wonder why? You can read more about what it’s like to work at Deloitte Digital here.
It’s been a great year for Deloitte Digital – thanks to all who helped make it happen! Watch out, 2017. Here we come.