Accenture has agreed to acquire creator and social agency Whalar, folding it into Accenture Song. Whalar brings 170 staff and a track record of more than $600 million in creator campaigns, in what is being called the largest creator economy deal yet.
A consultancy buying a creator agency is the clearest sign yet that influencer marketing graduated from experiment to infrastructure.
Accenture has agreed to acquire Whalar, a creator and social agency, and fold it into Accenture Song. Whalar brings more than 170 people across the US, UK, Ireland, Germany and Spain, and a track record the company describes as the largest creator economy transaction yet. Terms were not disclosed. For scale, Publicis paid around $500 million for Influential in 2024.
Whalar has run more than $600 million in creator campaigns across over 40 countries. Its co-CEOs stay on. This is the latest in a run of Accenture Song deals, after Superdigital and Unlimited, aimed at owning the creator and social layer rather than buying it in.
The value of creator campaigns Whalar has run, the scale Accenture just bought rather than built. Source: Accenture and B&T, June 2026.
Why it matters
When a global consultancy buys a creator agency, the creator channel has stopped being a line item and become a core capability. The big holding companies and consultancies are racing to own it because brands keep asking for it and few can run it well at scale.
For Australian businesses, the lesson is not to copy the deal. It is to notice what the deal is chasing. The value in creators is not reach, it is trust borrowed from someone the audience already follows. That is the muscle most local brands are weakest at, because they keep scripting creators like actors instead of letting them sound like themselves.
What to do about it
The consultancies are buying trust at scale. You can build a smaller version of it without a nine-figure cheque.