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If I were to ask you for a list of the most dynamic advertising markets in the world, chances are that Mauritius would not be among them. As you might expect for an exclusive holiday destination, it has a thriving tourist industry. But did you know that the island – which has an area of […]

Business, they say, is a lot like life – and so it is. In life, particularly at times of crisis or upheaval, it is not the strongest, or most intelligent, organisms which survive to pass their genes to future generations – it is the most adaptable; this, truly, is Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” – […]

A notable trend on the mergers and acquisitions scene over the past year or so has been the acquisition of marketing agencies (or at least entities which could be said to be at least partially engaged in one of the disciplines of marketing) by companies not directly engaged in the business of marketing itself. One […]

First off this week, I wanted to throw a thought out there, prompted by the sad news last week that HMV, the sole remaining High Street music and DVD chain, had gone into administration. This a blow to the multi-billion pound music biz, which is still one of the UK’s biggest export industries, and one […]

In this, the first of our blogs for 2013, we’re going to take a look back at the past twelve months to see if we can get a feel for what the trends might be for the next year. 2012 saw around 150 deals in our industry, from the big (WPP snapping up AKQA, possibly […]

It’s a familiar ritual for the less organised among us. We put off our Christmas shopping and leave ourselves open to last-minute panic buying. However, it seems that a number of businesses (none of whom we could regard as being remotely disorganised) have put off present shopping and gone for a different kind of retail […]

The first of the deals we’re going to look at this week involved the Norwich- based (what is it about Norwich at the moment? – see previous blogs) digital agency Selesti acquiring – for an undisclosed sum – the search marketing division of Online Media Group (OMG). Selesti, by contrast, is a youngster. It only […]

One of the big misconceptions about the marketing services industry is that it’s a pond in which big fish swim around, sizing up smaller fish and then gobbling up those they regard as the most attractive and the most potentially nutritious. While it’s true that most acquirers in our industry consist of large groups – […]

What’s interesting about all these acquisitions are that they signal the intent of medium-sized marketing agencies to grow and develop both scale and a wider, more integrated range of offerings. Will one of them be the next big integrated group? Who knows – but we’ll be taking a look at how these growing agencies might […]