Publicis and Stagwell kick off 2022 M&A with Tremend and Goodstuff buys
If 2021 was a year of consolidation for the big ad holding companies – restoring their fortunes after Covid-battered 2020 – 2022 may be the year when they spread their wings with bids and deals.
Publicis Groupe has bought Tremend (below), a big Bucharest- based software engineering company, to add to its Publicis Sapient “business transformation” business. Tremend has 650 software engineers and clients include Carrefour, ING and Orange. Tremend was founded in 2005 by Ioan Cocan and Marius Hanganu.
Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz says: “We’re impressed with the Tremend team’s vision, the breadth of its skillset and capabilities around agile engineering and its deep industry expertise. Bringing Tremend into Publicis Sapient is a powerful expansion of our global distributed delivery model and we expect to rapidly grow headcount to 2,500 people by 2025 as well as our geographic footprint in the region.
“We’re also excited by the strong cultural match between the two organizations and look forward to driving even more client impact together.”
Mark Penn’s Stagwell, which now owns MDC Partners, has bought Goodstuff, one of the UK’s bigger independent media agencies. Goodstuff was founded by Andrew Stephens and Ben Hayes in 2004. The deal is reportedly worth a maximum of £30m. Goodstuff bills over £200m.
Stephens and Hayes say: “Goodstuff’s unswerving mission is to be the world’s most inventive media agency, and to help accelerate our next phase, we wanted to join a network that could bring world-class capabilities in data, technology, and digital.
“In Stagwell, we’ve not only found these services, but also a partner that perfectly aligns with our culture of entrepreneurialism, invention, and progress. We’ve been hugely impressed by Stagwell’s challenger status and ambitions, their senior leadership team, and the breadth of world-class modern marketing brands in the group.”
Goodstuff will join Stagwell Media Network which claims to manage more than $3bn of media annually.
