Convergence Across the Digital Marketing Landscape

As we have opined on several occasions, the historic silos of software, services and data are converging across many sectors to provide powerful solutions to the end clients. The Digital Marketing sector is beginning to see significant momentum in the convergence across platforms to deliver an unprecedented and powerful new set of tools to the marketplace. This convergence is coming from both partnerships as well as merger & acquisition activity amongst market participants.

One key example is the current partnership between Experian and Oliver Wyman. Experian, the data expert, came together with Oliver Wyman, a strong pedigreed financial services consultant, to develop IntelliView. IntelliView provides innovative consumer credit market Market Intelligence Reports. The web based solution is a very strong offering in the market as it combines two powerful brands in Experian & Oliver Wyman to deliver a best of breed products set to their customers.

A recent M&A example is the acquisition by PricewaterhouseCoopers of two different companies: Logan Tod & Co. in the UK and Ant’s Eye View in the US. Both of these acquisitions serve to strengthen PwC’s reach in the digital marketing consulting market. Moreover, they have enabled PwC to create a digital intelligence team that is leveraging analytic tools to help customers evaluate and manage their “Big Data” information sets to deliver optimized Digital Marketing solutions.

Finally, today, Alliance Data Systems’ Epsilon group announced the closing of the acquisition of Hyper Marketing at a healthy 9.0X forward EBITDA. Epsilon continues to marry their data analytics capability with key digital marketing consulting and agency platforms to build the “Agency of the Future”. We believe the pace of activity in this space is going to continue to accelerate. Moreover, we expect valuations to continue at robust levels for both M&A and capital raising. Stay tuned for further developments as the convergence across technology, data and services accelerates in the digital marketing arena.