Integrated Melbourne agency Spinach has acquired digital analytics and optimisation consultancy Digital Balance.
Spinach, aiming to broaden the agency’s expertise and knowledge with data, purchased the business from consultancy Ebiquity.
The deal, whose commercial terms haven't been revealed, means 12 new staff moving to the South Melbourne office alongside Spinach's 21 headcount.
Digital Balance provides strategic advice, hands-on expertise, support and training across MarTech enablement and strategy; digital analytics and data insights; optimisation and experimentation; and omnichannel customer experience.
The two businesses will operate autonomously and collaborate when it serves the best interests of individual clients.
Digital Balance’s client list includes organisations in the education, utility, finance, travel, media, food and beverage and logistics sectors.
“Spinach’s work with brands in the insurance and retailer spaces has highlighted an ever-increasing role for data and marketing technology wrangling," says Spinach CEO Craig Flanders.
“Today’s CMOs, CIOs and CTOs are navigating a progressively complex data landscape that is only going to become more so when impending privacy changes are implemented.
“With businesses expected to deliver an enhanced and personalised customer experience when selling and transacting online, we want to provide that expertise now and into the future as demand continues to grow.”
Flanders, who recalls the arrival of fax machines when he started in advertising, says Spinach has been more nimble with technology than others.
"What we could see in talking to our clients is that they had a lot of concerns about the rate of change in martech and the handling of data," he says.
"And being entrepreneurial we wanted a piece of that action, because we could see that growing a lot faster and probably being sustained a lot longer than traditional agency services.
"We wanted to get involved in an ongoing concern that already had a quality client list and a depth of expertise. So when Digital Balance came on the market we were very keen .
"We're adding skills and experience to our broader team but also unashamedly a better business decision as well to follow the money."
Flanders says Spinach becomes more valuable if it can help marketing people work better with the the technical digital people at client sites.
Tourism Western Australia, a Digital Balance client, says one of the challenges it faces is aligning data practices to a range of international privacy regulations, from GDPR, the Privacy Act, CCPA and others.
"Digital Balance has partnered with us to help navigate this space and implement a Consent Management platform tailored to the privacy requirements of each market we operate in," says Chris Amson, senior manager digital platforms, Tourism Western Australia.
"Digital Balance has also helped us move our tagging infrastructure from browser-side to server-side, to give us an extra layer of control for data privacy by allowing us to screen incoming data requests and set data compliance rules to automatically modify these if needed."
Digital Balance managing director Richard Taylor, who at one time worked for Spinach on the digital side, says Digital Balance has since 2011 helped brands unlock the value of their data and drive deeper customer engagement and business growth.
"The acquisition enables us to expand our existing service offering, particularly in the CX optimisation and experimentation space, by utilising Spinach’s cross-platform UI/UX design, copywriting, and qualitative and quantitative research capability," he says.
The acquisition follows several client wins for Spinach including the Australian Conservation Foundation, Blackswan Dips, Nutri V and Kogan.
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