August is traditionally a quieter month for mergers and acquisitions but, once again, Results International has seen good levels of global activity in the third quarter, continuing the recent trajectory as the market remains dynamic and fast-paced.
We have tracked 63 deals in the marketing services space in August and are excited about activity over the coming months into 2022. Strong private-equity appetite has been a recurring theme alongside an increasingly confident strategic buyer pool, which transacted 55 deals in August.
Once again, in August, North America was the busiest region with 25 targets acquired, alongside 13 in the UK and 12 in western Europe.
Deals of note in the month include:
Belgian-listed digital group Emakina was acquired by New York-listed development and engineering group EPAM Systems – another good example of digital strategy and design capabilities being combined with the digital product and engineering ecosystem.
Omobono was acquired by Horizon Capital-backed The Marketing Practice. Omobono is a UK-headquartered business-to-business digital experience agency offering complementary brand and creative digital services.
MediaSense received significant investment from Apiary Capital – an interesting deal for a scaled global media advisor providing capital for global expansion and capability development.
US ecommerce agency Visiture was acquired by Shamrock Capital-backed performance marketing group Wpromote, expanding its US reach and strengthening its Adobe and Shopify partnerships and capabilities.
Canadian programmatic agency MediaNet was acquired by Livingbridge-backed Brainlabs, driving further North American expansion and a strengthening of wider Google stack capability.
US language and technology solutions group TransPerfect acquired UK-headquartered business-to-business performance media operation WebCertain Group – another example of the language and translation vertical combining with digital marketing capabilities.
James Kesner is director at Results International
Campaign works with Results International on M&A analysis for Campaign's Advertising Intelligence, which tracks the latest new-business activity in the industry. Find out more here
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