Digital marketing big part of recent merger deals, says report
According to R3, digital marketing has been a major player in business mergers and acquisitions so far this year. Advertising Age spoke to the consultant firm's co-founder, Greg Paull, about the significance of the figures. One major finding was that the amount of deals centering around digital marketing capabilities has grown by 20 percent over last year to reach a level of 62 percent.
Paull addressed this in his conversation with the source, noting the range of entities involved in these recent mergers. The R3 report looked not just at U.S. deals but also at those in other countries, including China.
"Obviously, the diversity of acquirers has come up a lot this year," Paull said. "You see a lot of new companies that weren't necessarily there before. Everyone from IBM to Accenture. So I think that has been interesting. And a lot of the private equity companies are coming up as well." He also said that ad tech, analytics and marketing companies are now the targets of major companies who weren't as interested in them before.
Both of the companies Paull mentioned conducted mergers within the past few months. In late March, IBM announced that it would purchase Bluewolf to improve its analytics functions. Before this acquisition, Bluewolf was noted as a Salesforce partner.
Accenture similarly recently purchased Redcore, a company with ties to Oracle. As CRN noted, this was the most recent step in an acquisition trend for Accenture: the previous year, it acquired a Salesforce partner, Cloud Sherpas. Although the Redcore merger seemed to be largely tied to security concerns, it echoed the similar operational issues seen in other decisions from major tech companies, as mentioned in the report.