Dive Brief:
- Performance marketing agency Wpromote has acquired full-service creative shop Giant Spoon to form a new agency, Wpromote x Giant Spoon, per a company announcement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- Wpromote CEO Andrea Bendzick will lead the merged agency, which promises to support creative strategy with data-driven results and to streamline processes for clients by integrating media, creative, data and full-funnel strategy all in one place.
- The deal comes on the heels of Omnicom Group closing its $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group roughly one year after it was announced. That deal has prompted a flurry of mergers and acquisitions throughout the industry.
Dive Insight:
Giant Spoon has been known for taking big creative swings, including wrapping a giant dragon around the Empire State Building and featuring actor Timothée Chalamet in a campaign for Lucid Motors. Its merger with Wpromote points to the growing demand from clients for data-driven results. The addition of Wpromote’s proprietary data will enable creatives “to connect the impact of big ideas all the way to our clients’ bottom line,” noted Giant Spoon co-founder Jonathan Haber, in a statement.
Haber, along with Giant Spoon’s other co-founders Marc Simons and Trevor Guthrie will join the new agency’s executive leadership team. At Giant Spoon, Haber headed up creative and strategy; Simons oversaw experiential, and Guthrie led media. They are expected to continue in those roles within the merged Wpromote x Giant Spoon.
The acquisition also highlights how the industry is preparing to compete with the offerings from a merged Omnicom and IPG. In the past year, independent agencies Barkley and OKRP merged to form BarkleyOKRP while Empower and MediaOcean combined to create Empower Ocean Media Group. Even among the larger holding companies, M&A talk has heated up. Havas formed a joint venture with Horizon Media to better position itself to win global clients. Dentsu, meanwhile, is reportedly mulling a sale of its international business.
Wpromote x Giant Spoon will be a place where “media, creative, data and full-funnel strategy are deeply integrated, not just co-existing,” said CEO Bendzick, in a statement.
Through the acquisition, Wpromote, which manages more than $3 billion in media spending for clients such as Peacock, Vuori and TransUnion, will add creative and strategy to the insights and forecasting provided by the agency’s existing proprietary tech and data platform, Polaris IQ. The result is an agency model that can appeal to CMOs and CFOs, per the announcement. This approach reflects the importance of the CFO-CMO relationship for large marketers and the need to overcome challenges like pinpointing value.
