Inside Publicis Groupe’s plan to buy Influential

Publicis Groupe plans to acquire Influential, the world’s largest influencer marketing agency by revenue, to boost the holding company’s influencer marketing capabilities in response to surging client demand. Publicis and Influential declined to disclose the terms of the deal, which is expected to close in August. “We see the acceleration in our clients’ need to have more expertise and more scale in influencer marketing,” Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun told Ad Age. “This is one of the biggest trends of our industry … and we saw in Ryan [Detert, Influential CEO] and his team a unique opportunity to add to our team a significant expansion and a very important layer. We are clearly taking leadership on a very important trend and something that is every day more important for our clients.” See all of the 2024 Small Agency award winners here Influential was founded in 2013 by its CEO Detert, former president Daniel Steele and former chief technology officer Piotr Tomasik. The agency, which was named Ad Age’s 2024 social media/influencer agency of the year, has been partnering with Publicis on individual campaigns since 2019, Detert said. Influential and Publicis have been in conversations for over a year about “things we should do together to commercially deliver better for our clients,” Detert said. Influential is headquartered in Las Vegas and has expanded to Los Angeles, New York and Chicago in the years since its launch. The agency generated $100 million in revenue in 2022 and an estimated $150 million in 2023, according to its Ad Age A-List entry. Also read: 7 influencer marketing trends for the rest of 2024 Influential has worked with major brands including McDonald’s, Meta, Amazon, Mattel, Walt Disney Company, Reckitt and Hilton. It currently works with 300 brands globally. Beyond its work, Influential has become known for its large presence at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. This year, the influencer agency doubled its beach footprint at the festival. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Influential (@influential_co) Access to expertise Before agreeing to purchase Influential, Publicis’ influencer marketing offerings were scattered across various agencies in its network—including Razorfish, which in March established an in-house team of content creators. Influential will instead be “at the center” of Publicis’ agency network and work across the holding company’s growth, client and media teams “to make sure that every one of our clients can have access to their expertise,” Sadoun said. But Influential will largely continue to operate as it currently does, maintaining the same leadership team and working with its existing client roster on top of Publicis clients, Detert said. Two key differentiators that drew Publicis to Influential are its network of over 3.5 million creators and its AI-powered data platform, which currently draws on over 100 billion data points to match clients with optimal influencer partners and inform influencer campaign strategies, Sadoun said. By combining Influential’s data with Epsilon’s expansive consumer database, Influential and Publicis will be able to “essentially usher in a new era of influencer marketing” by “being able to talk to a consumer wherever they live, whether they’re on social, on digital or on digital out-of-home,” Detert said. “A lot of it comes down to audience insights, profile insights on the creators themselves and their behaviors, and their audience’s behaviors. That data exists in Epsilon and Identity.” For instance, the partnership will provide Influential insight into a creator’s purchasing history to determine whether they have previously bought certain products from a brand or shopped at a specific retailer; or, on the audience side, determine “whether there’s a match between the people following [a creator] and the people that are making the purchases that Epsilon is capturing,” he added. The acquisition also allows Publicis to add influencer marketing as a third branch to the “new media ecosystem” the holding company has built, Sadoun said, the other two pieces of which are connected TV and commerce, “particularly retail media.” “The vision is to say that we are clearly leading in personalization at scale,” he added. Holding companies dive in Publicis’ acquisition of Influential is the latest example in the growing trend of holding companies beefing up their influencer chops. WPP acquired two influencer shops, the Goat Agency and Obviously, in 2023 after buying influencer marketing agency Village Marketing in 2022. Both Obviously and Village Marketing became a part of VML. In November 2023, Stagwell acquired Movers+Shakers, a social creative agency that helped revolutionize marketing on TikTok. And just yesterday, the holding company announced its acquisition of influencer marketing and social commerce agency Leaders, based in Israel. Holding companies “don’t want to lose this business to smaller agencies,” one influencer marketing executive told Ad Age, “and in the mad dash for holding companies to kind of hold on, [influencer agencies] are the newest bright and shiny object. “I think the consolidation of the creator agency space is in process and overdue for a lot of different reasons,” the exec continued. “The traditional agencies, for a long time, pooh-poohed creator marketing. And now it’s interesting because, with the decline of TV and the rise of YouTube, [influencer marketing] is their big moneymaker.” Also read: Small agencies are winning big accounts

Inside Publicis Groupe’s plan to buy Influential

Featured Stories