OLIVER has had its majority stake acquired by Brandtech group You & Mr Jones.
You & Mr Jones launched in June 2015 after raising $350 million to build a technology group to help brands use marketing technology.
The company has made 39 deals since its launch including investments in Amino, Automat, Evrythng, Gravity Road, Mofilm, Mobkoi, Niantic, Pinterest, theAmplify, and 55.
Its latest investment in OLIVER aims to accelerate growth and reinforce its tech, including the agency’s content creation and management tech platform.
Inside Idea Group (formally the majority stake of OLIVER) still holds a stake in the business.
OLIVER has grown to 1500 staff working across 36 countries with annual revenues of more than $150 million since the agency’s launch in 2004. Its clients include Adida, AXA, Barclaycard, BMW, Google, The Guardian, Marriott, Manulife, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Virgin Media and 3M.
Simon Martin, founder and CEO at OLIVER and Inside Ideas Group, said he was excited to be joining a group that will enable clients to tap into a broad range of tech capabilities.
“We already offer brand marketers a totally new in-house creative model – now they will also be able to access a wider spectrum of the most advanced and innovative marketing technology solutions.
“We had a great deal of interest in our business, but for us the opportunity to be part of a brandtech group and to connect our in-house model to the world’s leading marketing technology platform, was by far the most interesting,” said Martin.
David Jones, founder and CEO at You & Mr Jones described Simon Martin as a ‘brilliant talent’ and commended OLIVER’s in-house model for delivering creativity and saving global brands hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Plugging OLIVER’s in-house model – and its sophisticated content creation and management technology platform – into our You & Mr Jones tech ecosystem is a very powerful combination,” Jones added. Together, we can create enterprise-level marketing solutions at an unprecedented scale and transform profoundly how a brand does its marketing.”
OLIVER took the top spot in last year’s Agency Benchmarking Report 2018 ranking and was rated number one as the fastest growing UK marcomms agency.
