The lines between media consultants, advertising agencies and content providers are blurring, as pressure on ad revenues drives media businesses to seek new sources of growth, including events, e-commerce — and now, giving advice to the corporate world.

Bloomberg, best known for its financial information terminals and wire service, is the latest company to enter the increasingly congested space of consulting, becoming the first major publisher to do so.

A new service launched this month, aimed at competing with management consultants and media agencies, already has five clients. 

The idea is that Bloomberg will use data from across its assets — including the eponymous terminals, its news service and specialist publisher Bloomberg New Energy Finance — to inform its advisory services. 

Services will include brand consulting, corporate communications and marketing strategy advice, among others. 

“Our insights and our knowledge of the target audience that we service, business and financial decision makers, is unparalleled,” Justin Smith, chief executive of Bloomberg Media, told the Financial Times. “The strategy we are implementing now is an attempt to find a new model of media.”

The announcement comes as the company’s media arm seeks to diversify its revenues in the face of the growing challenge from the digital advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook, alongside an erosion of print advertising.

As part of this push, Bloomberg announced that it was putting Businessweek, its 88-year-old financial magazine, behind a paywall in June.

But the company hopes that its consulting offering, which is costing clients between $150,000 and $200,000 a month on average, will also boost advertising revenues, as it will be able to tailor “bespoke solutions” to clients of the service on its own platforms. 

The initiative has been led by Andrew Benett, who joined Bloomberg Media as chief commercial officer this year after 13 years at advertising giant Havas, latterly as the chief executive of Havas Creative. 

Bloomberg has also brought in experienced staff from consultancies including McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group, as well as creative agencies.

In total, the company plans to hire about 25 people by the end of the year to focus on “strategy and creative”, while reorganising its entire media sales department by sector to support the new model. 

“For companies that trade in high-value information and analysis, the extension into consulting and professional services is a natural move,” says Ken Doctor, media analyst at Newsonomics. 

The move comes as Google and Facebook continue to increase market share, transforming the digital advertising industry. In 2017, they are expected to extend their dominance to control 60 per cent of the growing market, according to a forecast from eMarketer. 

In response, publishers are reshaping their business models. Mr Doctor expects advertising to become a “strong secondary support” to reader revenues. He also notes the rise of new ventures such as events and ecommerce. 

“Bloomberg is subject to the same pressures of digital advertising,” he says. “[But] they have the luxury of a long-term plan and the capacity to spend three to five years building a business.”

Bloomberg does not disclose financial results, but analysts estimate it generates 80 per cent of its $9bn in annual revenues from its terminals. 

But it suffered its second-ever drop in the number of its terminals last year, down by 3,145 to just under 324,500, because of cost cuts at the banks and financial institutions that make up its core customers, according to Burton-Taylor International Consulting.

The Bloomberg initiative fits a wider trend, evident for some years, of the blurring of boundaries in consulting.

Management consultants, including the Big Four professional services groups PwC, KPMG, EY and Deloitte, have expanded into adjacent areas, including legal advice and digital marketing.

This year, Accenture, PwC, IBM and Deloitte made it into the top 25 for the largest advertising and marketing-services agencies, according to industry rankings.

Growth in this space has come in part through acquisitions: Deloitte this month acquired European creative agency Acne, while last year Accenture bought Karmarama, then the third-largest UK independent agency by billings, for example. 

Edward Haigh, a director at Source Global Research, which analyses the consulting market, says: “What we have is a story about convergence and different people turning up to that party with different things. These guys [Bloomberg] are turning up with data.”

Wider disruption of the consulting industry would have to overcome client suspicion of new entrants and the established position of big consultancies as trusted advisers, he says. 

“It’s about being able to guide your client through complex challenges and help them make difficult decisions in challenging, competitive environments, and data on its own doesn’t do that. The question is what you do with the data and how you use it to change the organisation.”

Others warn of the challenges of moving into an area where big technology companies, media analytics specialists and traditional consulting companies are all competing for clients. Many of these potential customers have also hired their own data scientists in the past five years.

Paul Henninger, senior managing director in the data and analytics practice of FTI, a consultancy, says: “They will find they are entering a crowded and increasingly confused space.”