Background
When the owners of Adstream, The Paul Ramsay Foundation, decided to pursue the sale of their business, they sought an advisor who could help them run a highly strategic process that maximized the outcome for the foundation as well as providing the right home for the company. With our extensive experience across the Marketing Services and Technology, Digital Media and Content landscapes, as well as our decade-long relationship with both the foundation and Adstream, JEGI CLARITY was selected for the role.
Sector Context
The marketing and advertising ecosystems have been faced with an increasingly fragmented and evolving media landscape, particularly when it comes to video. The number of platforms, channels, tech partners, and asset formats needed to reach consumers on every screen have added untold complexity and friction amongst the many teams who launch and manage campaigns. The consequences of separate workflows and the lack of holistic creative asset management has led to quality and formatting errors, delayed campaign starts, expensive talent & rights violations amongst other issues that would otherwise have been solved through seamless video execution. As legacy, error-prone manual processes become increasingly time-consuming and over complicated to use, brands are looking for better ways to deploy and manage tech-driven video campaigns.
Our Role
JEGI CLARITY was hired by Adstream’s owners, The Paul Ramsay Foundation, to find the right partner for the next step in the business’s journey. Having had a relationship with the company for over a decade and with prior experience in the sector, the JEGI CLARITY team had direct access to the most relevant trade buyers, and leveraged Adstream’s unique place in the market to build an extremely competitive process.
In Extreme Reach, the company found a partner that was very similar operationally and held shared ambitions for the future, with both management teams being extremely excited about the combined company going forwards and the enhanced value they will be able to offer their clients.
Transaction Detail
Adstream is a powerful cross-media advertising content delivery platform and is a leading global provider of digital asset management, creative logistics, and analytics solutions. Headquartered in the UK and employing over 450 people across 33 offices, Adstream supports thousands of customers with millions of deliveries each year.
The company was one of only a few major global players in the market with a set of blue-chip clients that include multinational brands, global agencies, and post-houses. Adstream had spent the last few years investing in and developing its asset management tools, workflow tools, and infrastructure.
Following discussion with a number of parties, Extreme Reach was chosen as the partner due to the very strong fit both from capability and chemistry perspectives. Both companies have very similar ambitions and the combination allows Adstream to bring its asset management tools, workflow tools and infrastructure as well as a strong global footprint to Extreme Reach who in turn provide Adstream with key missing pieces in the digital space and talent & rights management.
Through the acquisition, the combined entity will be able to bring together previously separate parts of the campaign activation landscape that include creative asset management, talent & rights management, video ad serving, and TV/CTV/OTT activation to create a seamless, centralized, and fully end-to-end marketing workflow platform from which marketers will be able to deploy their communications globally.
