Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital has added two more businesses based in the US to his pure-play digital advertising agency.
Integrated agency Decoded Advertising will combine with content division MediaMonks and Metric Theory will go into programmatic and analytics agency MightyHive.
The two businesses had a combined gross profit of $US70 million in 2020. Decoded and Metric Theory will add just under 350 staff to S4’s current 3,400 employees.
Commercial details of the deals were not announced. However, the owners of the two businesses will be paid half in cash and half with S4 Capital shares.
S4, in a trading update, says it will still have significant net cash balances following the deals.
The company says that trading for the first 11 months and for December continue in line with market expectations, delivering strong like-for-like double digit revenue and gross profit growth. The nine investment analysts following S4 forecast gross profit of £279-300 million for 2020.
Decoded is an independent full-funnel marketing, advertising and design company. Its clients include T-Mobile, Intuit, Visa, WW International and SC Johnson. It hs offices in New York and Los Angeles.
Metric Theory is a digital advertising agency headquartered in San Francisco with more than 130 employees across New York City, Denver, Orange County, and Salt Lake City.
"Both combinations continue our momentum, broadening our digital, strategic, creative, data and digital media capabilities in line with our objectives for 2021,” says executive chair Sir Martin Sorrell.
Matt Rednor, Decoded's Founder and CEO: "Since day one it's been our goal to explore every strategic, creative and media lever at our disposal to build better brands and deliver better performance results. In S4Capital, we've found a group of like-minded collaborators that immediately expand our ability to disrupt the industry with a more modern approach to creativity."
Ken Baker, Metric Theory CEO and co-founder: "We're excited to bring our brand of numbers-obsessed, growth-obsessed, full-funnel performance marketing to MightyHive and S4Capital. It's clear that their mission and values are the same as ours, and that we'll be far better at delivering them together."
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