Brandtech Group finally closes its acquisition of Jellyfish as French investor Fimalac comes along for the ride

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by Lindsey Francy Jun 1, 2023 News
Brandtech Group finally closes its acquisition of Jellyfish as French investor Fimalac comes along for the ride

Jellyfish, a digital media and marketing group with global reach that Brandtech didn't have, was acquired by the Brandtech Group. The company is trying to win more business from giant marketers that roam the Earth.

According to David Jones, the founder and CEO of Brandtech Group, the company has 7,000 employees and $1 billion in revenue.

It gives us two really compelling core offers because we don't all want the same thing. Jones said that there were some people who wanted it all joined up and others who wanted it in house. Everyone wants to deliver content better, faster and cheaper using technology.

Fimalac, which owned a majority stake in Jellyfish, will get a piece of the Brandtech Group company and two of its members will sit on the board. Rob Pierre will step back from actively running the digital performance marketing network, but stays on as chair, working with Jones to find new M&A opportunities.

Brandtech leadership, from left to right: Nick Emery, Brandtech CFO Dawn Dickie, Jones, Pierre, and Brandtech partner Emma Cookson.

Nick Emery believes that the single profit and loss structure that Pierre engineered over the years at Jellyfish will appeal to marketers that have to overcome new types of challenges to win over consumers.

Brandtech Media has a lot of holdings due to its small media offerings. They want to have a global conversation and they haven't been able to compete at that level, but this gives them the platform to do that.

Emery thinks that a future agency model will be a kind of mercilessly efficient technology that assembles and disassembles client problems. If you have the financial structure that allows it, you can do that. If you have a company with more engineers and licenses than any of the individual holdcos, you can do it. That is a pretty strong combination. That is a recipe for success if you point it out to the world's largest marketers.

"Jellyfish's technology and creative/content capabilities combined with its digital and performance media competencies should be a breath of fresh air for the likes of Nick Emery and others with traditional media background," said Jay Pattisall, vp and principal analyst at Forrester. The combination of media, tech and content is a potent one. Nick will be like a kid in a candy store if he is honest and true.

Fimalac's conversion of its Jellyfish stake into a stake in the parent company could help Brandtech access more cash as it moves forward with more acquisitions down the road, according to outside observers. Since the company's founding, Jones has made investments in automation and machine learning.

He said that they would make more acquisitions. We will be looking at making a potential acquisition in the artificial intelligence space.

The media observer who declined to speak on the record but is familiar with Brandtech Group wondered why the deal took so long when word of the couple's engagement began to circulate. The executive said that it had not been plain sailing. A lot of due diligence has been done on the offer.

Jones and Emery said that Brandtech and Jellyfish have been working together for a few months. The time is ripe for such a combination of assets.

He said that large multi-national advertisers were looking for providers that could deliver scale and precision. In a combination of full-service media companies and digital natives.

The other media observer wondered if brands were ready for a digital holding company. The observer doesn't know if the consolidation will make a big difference in the short term. I don't think there's a lot of appetite.

Stagwell and S4 Capital should be on the lookout for Brandtech Group's increased competition. Tinuiti and BrainLabs are smaller than Brandtech, so they are more of a competitor than competing with any of the above.

There are more people watching the ball. PE-backed agencies are arriving at global scale and creating digitally focused and data-powered players that provide integration opportunities the traditional agencies are still working to bring together.