MSQ has had a busy time in the pandemic and now the marketing group has bought another well-known name, digital and customer engagement agency MBA. MBA will merge with MSQ’s Stack to create a £6m business, MBAstack. MBA founder Stephen Maher will be chairman and CEO.
As Maher Bird Associates the agency was backed by creative agency Simons Palmer in the 1990s. Another such venture, Manning Gottlieb Media, now under Omnicom ownership, remains a pillar of the British media agency establishment.
Clients of the merged agency include PSA Groupe (Peugeot, Citroen, DS), Royal Mail, HM Government, Interflora, Chiltern Railways, Innovate UK, Church & Dwight and Everest. It will be based at MSQ’s new Covent Garden London HQ.
Chairman Stephen Maher says: “MBA has always been about driving ROI for its clients, and I’m delighted that, with this move, we’ll have even more collective firepower to generate powerful solutions for brands.
“We have been proudly independent for many years but when MSQ approached us we saw the same entrepreneurial spark, the same progressive digital and data-driven outlook and the same belief in the effectiveness of breakthrough creativity that we know is the winning combination in today’s competitive world of marketing.”
MSQ agencies now include Freemavens (research and insight), Holmes & Marchant (branding and design), MMT Digital (web and digital product development), Smarts (PR and content), Stack (customer acquisition), Stein IAS (B2B marketing), The Gate (creative and media), Walk-In Media (full-service media) and twentysix (digital). It employs 800-plus people in 12 offices worldwide.
