Making it happen: How the managing director of Accenture Song navigates corporate creativity

Perhaps the most influential conversation in Zara Flynn’s career to date happened when she was 30. It was with her boss at creative agency Rothco and it came just after she had been asked to establish Guns or Knives, a new offshoot of the agency.

“It was a big decision moment – to stay in Rothco where I had been for seven years or to take this opportunity to set up this new experience-led agency,” she explains. But there was also something else going on for Flynn. “I remember going for coffee with my boss and telling him ‘look, just so you know, I’m trying to have a baby and it’s not going well’. I told him there would be a lot of appointments that I would need to go to.”

 Flynn and her husband were trying for a third time to have a baby at the time and, in her words, “the odds were against us”.

 “I didn’t know how my boss would react; if he would still want me to take the lead on this new project. It was a big moment,” she recalls. 

So, what happened? “He told me he couldn’t think of anyone else who would have had such an upfront conversation with him and he simply said that we’d make it work. And it was just that kind of moment,” she says animatedly. “It was a moment when I knew I could do two parts of my life, that I could have both. It meant I knew I would have the forgiveness over here [in work], if I needed to take time out. That one conversation gave me, in a way, the permission to do what I needed to do on the personal side of things, to be supported while I was doing it and to still be in a place where I could be professionally ambitious.”

Flynn does not underestimate the impact it had on her life and it also rippled into her leadership style today. Being supported through her pregnancy and after the birth of her twins, 10 weeks before their due date, meant she learned the importance of building the right sort of team to “ensure everyone feels supported while the work goes on”.

My colleagues were saying ‘woah you blew up Instagram and LinkedIn”

It’s something she has brought with her to her role as managing director of Accenture Song Ireland and it’s a message she shared when she won the Digital & Technology category of IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year awards in April. “At Accenture we work as a tribe so it is very strange to be receiving an award myself,” she said on the night.

Speaking about the prestigious award now, a few weeks later, she is still surprised at how much it meant to her and others. “I’ve had some amazing career highs over the past few years, been invited to some amazing events; speaking opportunities and all rest. But I’ve never gotten more of a reaction than I have for this award,” she says. “My colleagues were saying ‘woah you blew up Instagram and LinkedIn, which I certainly did not, but all the messages…well, it was lovely. And my kids were so proud of me! They are nine and I’ll always keep the cards they made for me – the words they used were just amazing.”

The direct path

Flynn is one of six children and was brought up in Waterford. Despite living in Dublin since moving to the city for college, she still considers herself a blow-in. “We’re back down to Waterford probably way more than we should,” she laughs. Her career path has been direct and focused and was, in a way, mapped out even when she was still in school in the sunny southeast. “I am one of those annoying people who were like ‘okay, that’s clear I know where I am going’,” she shares. “I was about 14 and we had to do an advertising project. Mine was on Finches Orange, remember that? [I certainly do.] Well, I fell in love with the whole creative process of advertising through that project.”

Flash forward to when she completed her masters, in advertising of course, and she had less than a week off before starting with Rothco. “I finished on a Wednesday and started working for Rothco, then a boutique agency with 18 people, the following Monday. It was an amazing experience of just trying to figure everything out. We had a brilliant team of owners and it was such a learning environment. Every day was different and I moved up the ranks as we got bigger clients, bigger accounts.”

“We were working with Heineken when, from a global perspective, there were only four agencies around the world doing that. We were doing more and more creative campaigns and it was fantastic.” However, after a few years, Flynn was looking for more. “All of a sudden I felt that there was something missing and I wanted a little bit more. So, I spoke to my bosses and the owners and that’s when they asked me to head up Guns or Knives.”

The subsidiary agency focused exclusively on experiential campaigns, something Flynn has always been passionate about. “It was super exciting – we were creating touchpoints with clients at every turn, whether it was on your phone through an app, at the supermarket, in the pub or at a festival. We created these touch points that would mean people would fall in love with a brand. It was all about creating campaigns that people could really connect with and we became more and more successful in Europe for doing that.” So, that was it for the next seven years.

Enter Accenture

Then came a big shift for Flynn, for the agency and the national advertising sector. In early 2018, Rothco, then Ireland’s biggest creative agency group was acquired by Accenture, along with its subsidiaries, Guns or Knives and Tadata. They were absorbed into Accenture Interactive. “It still feels relatively fresh,” says Flynn. 

Accenture Interactive, as it was then known, was boosting its ability to be an experience agency able to “design, build and run customer experiences to grow brands and businesses”. Though it was more technology and digitally-based, they were “trying to create unique brand and customer experiences and to connect brands to people in. That’s what we were already doing very successfully.”

For Flynn, what followed was the opportunity to work with an “icon of our industry” when, in 2019, Droga5, one of the most celebrated advertising firms in the world, was also acquired. In 2021 its founder David Droga was appointed CEO and creative chairman of Accenture Interactive. “He ended up becoming our boss and it was really exciting, because here’s this man who stands for everything that we want to do. It was huge.”

Sometimes, you just need to keep trying – fail fast, learn and move on.”

In April last year, a rebrand saw Accenture Interactive renamed as Accenture Song and Flynn describes their work as “solving business problems, but using creative thinking. All of a sudden, we were the largest creative powered technology group in the world. Our creativity and the creativity that has been with me through my whole career – it’s now fused with technology and it’s creating something that’s really brilliant in the world.”

Say Lists

Flynn has been involved in many innovative campaigns during her career, but a personal high is Say Lists. Inspired by a comment from a speech therapist, who is a sister of one of the creative directors, Flynn led the team who turned music into a universal speech therapy tool. In a collaboration with Warner Music and Apple Music, they created a collection of playlists that combine music and technology to highlight key phonetic sounds, giving children and families an accessible and fun way to practise the sounds they struggle with. The team developed an original algorithm that could trawl through popular music looking for patterns of repetition that are helpful for speech therapy. The resulting custom-built Saylists feature tracks such as ‘Don’t Start Now’ by Dua Lipa for the ‘D’ Playlist, ‘Good As Hell’ by Lizzo for the ‘G’ Playlist and ‘Right Here, Right Now’ by Fatboy Slim for the ‘R’ Playlist. 

Through this and other projects, Flynn maintains one of her guiding mantras – Make It Happen. “I believe there is always a way,” she earnestly tells me. “Sometimes, you just need to keep trying – fail fast, learn and move on. I have a relentless drive that keeps me motivated to find the right solution and deliver for our clients with an experience that people want to engage with. I really do believe that we can all ‘make it happen’ whatever that means for us.”

A golden ticket

For someone who seems visibly energised by her passion for what she does, I wonder if there have been tough times? Flynn shares something that sticks with her – “I remember Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture (“big Accenture” as Flynn calls it) saying once that ‘this is not a job for everyone’. And I just thought it was interesting because it’s not.”

If you are not valued or if your values are not a match, then you need to bite the bullet. Life’s too short.”

“I think you need to figure out where you want to go. It’s up to you to figure that out. After that you can find out how to get there. But you need to know what’s important to you. If you are with a company that is actually valuing what you value, you’re onto a golden ticket. You can give them as much as you can because they’ll give it back to you. Great people always get great things back.”

On the flipside, “if you are not valued or if your values are not a match, then you need to bite the bullet. Life’s too short. Find your why, find your purpose, find what’s going to set your world on fire. And trust your gut, I’m absolutely led by my gut.”

‘I can, I do’

Flynn also shares a personal tough time. “It was a few years after the kids were born, so in my mid-30s and I got lost. I started to lose all my confidence, it really was bad. I lost myself.” As a former competitive swimmer, being active is important for Flynn but during this time she wasn’t able to exercise, she wasn’t doing the “nice things I used to do” and she was questioning herself a lot.

 Driving home one day, she had an idea. “I realised that I was being so, so hard on myself. I was coming home in the car – where some of the best ideas start – and I had this thought that I’m doing so much stuff but I am giving myself shit for not being good enough. I was doubting myself about what I could do, but I was already doing all of this stuff – family, work. I was doing it.  So I had the idea for a little project, called ‘I can, I do’.”

I used to be a competitive swimmer and I take a lot of how I trained and how I recovered into the corporate world.”

On Flynn’s LinkedIn page, ‘I can, I do’ is described as: “a project is to reignite women’s confidence, drive, sacrifice and courage to help them achieve whatever their goals are”. She tells me it “is a reminder to be kind to yourself, to take a breather and remember how amazingly strong you really are. We created a cashmere jumper as a reminder for busy women, busy moms in particular, that you are good enough. When you might be feeling overwhelmed or that you are not good enough, you’d have this soft and gentle reminder to yourself that you’re more than enough; that you’re already doing what you’re thinking that you cannot do. So, give yourself a break.” The jumper sold out at their launch.

Active recovery

The fact that Flynn launched something so successful and meaningful while at a low point doesn’t surprise me – her gutsy energy really is infectious and it ripples across the screen as we speak. I ask if it’s sustainable and she says it’s supported by her way of thinking. “I used to be a competitive swimmer and I take a lot of how I trained and how I recovered into the corporate world.” She cites an interesting statistic that 80% of female Fortune 500 executives played competitive sports at one point in their lives and, as we digress somewhat, she shares that sports are something she often looks out for when interviewing and promoting people. “Especially competitive individual sports, it brings a certain characteristic,” she says.

 One element of how she trained was around the concept of recovery. “It is an active process – it doesn’t just happen, there is an act of recovery,” she says. During that low time, this meant literally getting active and it saw her get back to exercise through personal training. She prioritises regularly activity for her own head space, a time to recover from the go-go-go of work and life. “It’s time to actually just unwind and that’s what it looks like for me…that and hanging out with my family. It’s such craic with them, hanging out and doing things together.”

As a leader, Flynn is adamant that whatever support she has to ensure she is at her best creatively, is also available for all the team. “We offer a lot of supports to the team and most importantly it’s about checking in, making sure everyone is good, making sure they have what it is that’s important to them.” At a time of uncertainty in the tech space, it’s just the type of support one would imagine teams might need.

 I ask for a summary of where she is right now in her career and Flynn circles back to the award. “The award is a huge acknowledgment of where I am,” she smiles. “I feel like I am where I want to be right now.” 

This is the fourth in a series of articles written in collaboration with The Currency. Chief Executive of The Currency, Tom Lyons, was a judge of the annual IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year awards.

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