On March 18, 2026, Ad Age published one of the most closely read agency profiles of the year. Journalist Ewan Larkin was given unusual access to the leadership of Accenture Song — a company that has historically kept its executives off the record. The piece tracked Song’s evolution from Accenture Interactive into a $20 billion creative and experience division, working across marketing, design, commerce, and customer service. That number alone frames the stakes. This is not a boutique consultancy testing a media pilot. It is the world’s largest tech-powered creative group, by revenue, now formally entering a business that incumbent holding companies have spent decades building.
On September 1, 2025, Ndidiamaka (Ndidi) Oteh succeeded David Droga in leading Accenture Song. The transition was deliberate. Accenture Song, the $19 billion marketing arm of consulting giant Accenture, prepared for this leadership handoff as David Droga stepped down as CEO to move into the role of vice chair at Accenture. Taking his place was Ndidi Oteh, a 14-year Accenture veteran who had led Song’s business in the Americas. Oteh’s first major set-piece media profile — the Ad Age piece in March — landed with specific commercial weight. The article highlighted the company’s AI investments and its desire to be the ‘connective tissue’ between brands and their customers. That phrase matters more than it sounds. “Connective tissue” is infrastructure language, not agency language. Song is not pitching itself as a creative vendor. It is pitching itself as the operating layer between a brand and every customer touchpoint it has.
The media strategy embedded inside that profile is where the tension lives. The Ad Age reporting confirmed that Song is testing and scaling media planning and buying capabilities, starting with a successful Optus win in Australia. An Australian pilot saw Song assemble a new media team which, within six months, won the Optus media account. This was not a legacy relationship. There had been months of industry speculation about which agency would receive the media account in a three-horse race between the incumbent UM, WPP Media’s Wavemaker, and Accenture Song. Some industry sources had suggested that Accenture Song didn’t have the media buying muscle to execute media plans. It clearly did. Optus became Accenture Song’s first significant media client. The company spends north of $100 million on media billings, with the bulk — around 60 percent — on digital.
Subsidiary division Accenture Song Media, which handles Optus’s media strategy and buying operations, is led by newly-appointed managing directors Sam Greer, Chris Colter, and Melissa Fein. Although Accenture Song had previously inquired about buying independent agencies, a directive from its New York head office led it to build its media capability from the ground up. That decision — organic build rather than acquisition — says something about Song’s confidence in its technology stack. The company had already made notable hires, including a significant part of IPG Mediabrands’ leadership team in Australia and, globally, Dimitri Maex, a former top IPG executive. It had also attempted to build its own media-centric offerings, like the “Relevance Engine” for programmatic buying.
The governance commitment embedded in the Ad Age profile may prove to be the most commercially significant detail. The most important line in the article, from a governance standpoint, is Dimitri Maex’s commitment that principal-based buying “is not something we will engage in.” At a time when many major holding companies are doubling down on principal media to protect margins, this is a deliberate and very public contrast. If Song can operate profitably while taking a smaller cut of media, backed by Accenture’s wider revenue streams, it can apply real pressure on legacy networks that rely on media margins to fund other businesses. The public rejection of principal buying at scale — from a company with Accenture’s revenue base behind it — is not just positioning. For Accenture to say no, it creates a bifurcated industry, where you’ve got big players saying you’re either doing it or not doing it. That binary is now set.
Accenture Song’s own CEO has named the likely disruption clearly. CEO Ndidi Oteh predicted: “The model and the way that media [planning and buying] exists today, will not exist in two years.” She said the company is “building, borrowing and partnering and buying towards the future, not necessarily the past.” That is a direct statement about the obsolescence of the current model — from the head of an entity now actively competing within it.
Search the onchain record for .accenturesong. Nothing is there. No TLD registered on Freename, no namespace claimed on Unstoppable Domains, no presence on any major Web3 naming registry. The parent company, Accenture, operates a closed-registry ICANN brand TLD: .accenture. That TLD was created during ICANN’s New gTLD Program, which allowed organizations to apply for their own custom extensions. Its primary purpose is to serve as a trusted, verified digital namespace for the company’s internal operations, client communications, and marketing initiatives. It represents a move toward total brand control in the digital infrastructure space. Because .accenture is a closed registry, it is not available for general public registration. That asset is useful for web routing. It does nothing for onchain identity.
The .accenturesong TLD does not appear to have been registered on any public blockchain naming protocol. No second-level domains resolving under .accenturesong exist. There is no media.accenturesong, no campaigns.accenturesong, no audit.accenturesong. The onchain namespace is vacant. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape around holding company namespaces has already started forming. A .publicis TLD has been registered and exists as a blockchain asset, establishing a precedent in the sector for onchain namespace positioning. No equivalent action has been taken for the Song brand. Accenture, for a company that positions itself as a leader in decentralized identity infrastructure for its clients — its Digital Identity and Credential Management Orchestration Framework is designed to provide clients with a scalable, vendor-agnostic platform to accelerate their journey with Decentralized Identity — has not extended that logic to its own media-facing subsidiary.
The irony sharpens when you consider what Accenture sells. Blockchain and Web3 are described by Accenture as changing the game in business, with 90% of executives agreeing that these technologies help create stronger, more flexible partnerships and unlock new value. They are positioned as key to modernizing commerce and making operations smoother and more transparent. Accenture is recognized as a leader in blockchain services assessment by major industry analysts. The consulting business is actively building onchain infrastructure for financial institutions globally. The marketing subsidiary is building a transparency-led media business offchain, with no verifiable endpoint.
The transparency claim made in the Ad Age profile has no technical substrate that a machine can read. That is a structural problem, not a branding one. Here is what Song cannot currently do without an onchain identity layer attached to its media operation.
A client enterprise — say, a major telco running a $100 million media program with Song — can today receive reports. PDFs. Dashboard access. Data exports. What it cannot receive is a verifiable, timestamped, immutable record of what was bought, when, at what price, from which publisher, under what terms, audited against the original media plan. That record does not exist in a form that a machine can independently verify. The transparency claim lives in a contract and a client services team. Neither of those is queryable by an AI agent.
The Ad Age article makes clear that Accenture Song executives see large language models and AI agents as a new commerce channel, not just a creative tool. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet is quoted describing a future where AI agents transact on behalf of consumers. In that world, brands will not only need better ads but fundamentally redesigned supply chains, payment systems, and partnerships. The company is articulating the agentic commerce thesis clearly at the executive level. It is not yet building the onchain infrastructure to serve that thesis within its own media operation.
A media.accenturesong SLD — a second-level domain minted under a registered .accenturesong top-level domain on a blockchain naming protocol — would change the technical situation materially. Under a properly structured onchain identity layer, Song could publish cryptographically signed campaign provenance records: media plan versions, buy attestations, publisher confirmations, delivery logs. Each record would carry a timestamp, a chain hash, and a verifiable signature. A client’s AI system would not need to call a Song account manager to request a report. It would query the SLD directly, receive the attested data, and compare it against the original plan parameters. The audit would be autonomous and continuous.
This is not speculative technology. Developed by Coinbase, x402 revives HTTP’s long-dormant 402 Payment Required status code and transforms it into a programmable payment rail for autonomous AI systems. It natively makes payments possible between clients and servers, creating economies that empower agentic payments at scale. Every transaction is recorded onchain, providing a full audit trail by design. And because payments are denominated in USDC, cryptocurrency volatility is not a factor for enterprise deployments. The x402 protocol is already live. Coinbase launched x402 in May 2025. Since then, it has processed millions of payments. The x402 Foundation, co-founded by Coinbase and Cloudflare, now includes Google and Visa. Google has integrated x402 into its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2).
The infrastructure for agentic media auditing is being built right now. The structural gap is critical as the industry moves toward a projected $3–5 trillion in B2C agentic commerce by 2030, where traditional identity-based KYC and corporate spend policies are insufficient for autonomous entities. An enterprise AI agent acting on behalf of a CMO in 2027 will not verify media transparency through a PDF deck. It will look for a machine-readable onchain endpoint with signed data. A media.accenturesong SLD would provide exactly that endpoint. Without it, Song’s transparency commitment is a human-facing claim — legible to procurement teams, invisible to the autonomous systems that are increasingly making resource allocation decisions at the enterprise level.
What’s needed for the agentic economy to flourish is not just the technology that exists, but the idea of an AI registry, where as an owner or operator of a site or content, you say, ‘I’ll serve agents, either selling my goods or my data, but they need to be trusted.’ Does that exist today? No, not yet. But it’s happening. Song is building a media business explicitly predicated on a transparency claim that, under current architecture, no AI agent can independently verify. The agentic registry problem is the same problem the brand’s own CEO is describing when she talks about redesigning supply chains and payment systems. It is the same infrastructure question — applied one layer closer to home.
The competitor set is not standing still. Consultancies like Accenture Song are building media capabilities while explicitly rejecting principal trading. By stating that they will not buy media and resell it, they are positioning themselves as fully transparent alternatives with different incentive structures. But positioning and verifiability are different things. The holding companies — WPP, Publicis, Omnicom — do not currently have onchain media attestation infrastructure either. None of them have claimed the relevant brand namespaces in a way that would support autonomous agent authentication for their media operations. The window exists. It will not stay open.
Song is building something real. The Optus win is evidence. Dimitri Maex’s principal-buying commitment is evidence. The $20 billion revenue base and the direct line to Accenture’s AI and technology infrastructure are structural advantages no holding company can easily replicate. CEO Oteh’s prediction — that the media planning and buying model as it exists today will not exist in two years — is probably correct. The architecture of what replaces it will be shaped by who controls the verifiable identity layer for media transactions. Offchain transparency claims served adequately in a world where humans read the reports. They do not serve in a world where autonomous systems route media budget based on queryable attestation records. Song has the thesis. It does not yet have the onchain address.
The author holds onchain positions related to this topic. This post reflects independent editorial judgment.