Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital – now describing itself as a “new age/new era digital advertising and marketing services company” – has duly completed its merger with US programmatic outfit MightyHive for $150m. the money to be paid half in cash and half in new S4C shares.
Company founders Peter Kim and Christopher Martin will join S4C’s board.
S4C executive chairman Sorrell (below) says: “The merger with MightyHive marks an important second strategic step for S4 Capital. The peanut has now morphed into a coconut, and is growing and ripening. MediaMonks’ award-winning digital creative production and MightyHive’s market-leading programmatic offering will give S4 Capital’s clients end-to-end, fully integrated and seamless capabilities in purely digital marketing.
“Following both the MightyHive merger and the recent opening of the MediaMonks office in San Francisco, S4 Capital’s focus on the West Coast of the United States and the digital natives at companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, not forgetting the software giants Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle, will intensify.”
Sorrell’s first acquisition MediaMonks already works for FileMaker and Netflix and Sorrell has clearly identified an opportunity in the big budget West Coast elite, many of whom are busily bringing their marketing in-house but also need (he hopes) the combination of creative and technical services that S4C now offers.
Other deals will doubtless follow although, doing it this way via so-called mergers, means diluting S4’s shares or issuing a constant stream of new ones. the mightyHive deal was partly funded by a $90m investment from The Stanhope Entrepreneurs Fund, a growth capital fund managed by Stanhope Capital
Sorrell, unlike in his days at WPP, will also have a board stuffed full of company managers. At WPP none of the network heads were on the main board.
