Wpromote acquires Giant Spoon, merging performance, creative proficiencies

• Performance marketing agency Wpromote has acquired full-service creative shop Giant Spoon to form a brand new agency, Wpromote x Giant Spoon, per an organization announcement. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
• Wpromote CEO Andrea Bendzick will lead the merged agency, which guarantees to support creative strategy with data-driven results and to streamline processes for clients by integrating media, creative, data and full-funnel strategy multi functional place.
• The deal comes on the heels of Omnicom Group closing its $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group roughly one yr after it was announced. That deal has prompted a flurry of mergers and acquisitions throughout the industry. 

Giant Spoon has been known for taking big creative swings, including wrapping an enormous dragon across the Empire State Building and featuring actor Timothée Chalamet in a campaign for Lucid Motors. Its merger with Wpromote points to the growing demand from clients for data-driven results. The addition of Wpromote’s proprietary data will enable creatives “to attach the impact of massive ideas all of the approach to our clients’ bottom line,” noted Giant Spoon co-founder Jonathan Haber, in an announcement. 

Haber, together with Giant Spoon’s other co-founders Marc Simons and Trevor Guthrie will join the brand new agency’s executive leadership team. At Giant Spoon, Haber headed up creative and strategy; Simons oversaw experiential, and Guthrie led media. They are expected to proceed in those roles throughout the merged Wpromote x Giant Spoon.

The acquisition also highlights how the industry is preparing to compete with the offerings from a merged Omnicom and IPG. In the past yr, independent agencies Barkley and OKRP merged to form BarkleyOKRP while Empower and MediaOcean combined to create Empower Ocean Media Group. Even among the many larger holding firms, M&A chat has heated up. Havas formed a three way partnership with Horizon Media to higher position itself to win global clients. Dentsu, meanwhile, is reportedly mulling a sale of its international business. 

Wpromote x Giant Spoon will probably be a spot where “media, creative, data and full-funnel strategy are deeply integrated, not only co-existing,” said CEO Bendzick, in an announcement.

Through the acquisition, Wpromote, which manages greater than $3 billion in media spending for clients reminiscent of Peacock, Vuori and TransUnion, will add creative and technique to the insights and forecasting provided by the agency’s existing proprietary tech and data platform, Polaris IQ. The result’s an agency model that may appeal to CMOs and CFOs, per the announcement. This approach reflects the importance of the CFO-CMO relationship for big marketers and the necessity to overcome challenges like pinpointing value.