Sir Martin Sorrell’s latest acquisition for S4 Capital programmatic media company MighyHive has won Cheddar in the US, described as a “post cable networks” company. Cheddar specialises in OTT (over the top) video and currently runs two live channels – Cheddar, which covers business news, and general news channel Cheddar Big News.
Cheddar founder Jon Steinberg, former president of Buzzfeed, is reported as saying “several of our clients asked us to extend the campaigns we were doing for them across the web. We saw an opportunity, need, and in MightyHive, a solution to do and measure this.” SMS is reported as saying he’s “thrilled,” unusually succinct but maybe he doesn’t know what Cheddar is.
The world is full of such challenger new media brands, some of which succeed (or are sold on) other which don’t. Cheddar is doubtless the kind of client which would have gone to MightyHive (valued at $150m so presumably it has a lot of such clients) regardless of Sorrell’s involvement.
Cheddar investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Raine Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Comcast Ventures, AT&T, Amazon, Antenna Group, Ribbit Capital, The New York Stock Exchange, Altice USA, 7 Global Capital, and Dentsu Ventures – which sounds impressive.
Sorrell has positioned S4 (which also owns Dutch production company MediaMonks) as a kind of hand maiden to the burgeoning, mostly US-based technology industry. Cheddar ticks that box.
