Two influencer marketing platforms were acquired by ad agencies this week, a sign that the advertising industry sees influencer-led strategies as promising enough to attract investment in the technology behind them.
The larger of the two deals was announced on Thursday, with Publicis Groupe saying it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Influential, the world's largest influencer marketing platform by revenue.
On Wednesday, Stagwell announced it had acquired LEADERS, a digital agency specializing in influencer marketing, and its InfluencerMarketing.AI (IMAI) SaaS platform. Stagwell will add influencer capabilities to its PRophet Comms Tech Suite of tools for PR and marketing professionals in the Stagwell Marketing Cloud.
Publicis Groupe acquires Influential
Publicis and Influential are a merger of two of the biggest companies in their respective fields: Publicis is one of the leading advertising agency holding companies, while Influential is the largest in the relatively new influencer marketplace platform sector.
Marketers and agencies use Influential to connect brands and creators in the same way that marketers use online platforms to find freelance designers and writers, but Influential operates like a kind of dating site, matching the right creators with the right brands based on data.
Influential claims to have 100 billion data points on its AI-powered platform and 3.5 million creators, including 90% of the world's influencers with more than 1 million social media followers. The company claims that Influential creators currently work with more than 300 brands around the world.
Adding a market leader in influencer marketing to the mix will provide a boost for Publicis and its agencies. A centralized platform for finding creators is certainly better than finding the right talent on social platforms or through email. But to be clear, this combination, like much of marketing today, is built on data.
Publicis has put its data technology platform Epsilon at the heart of its business, providing it with a wealth of information on consumers, and the company hopes that by combining Epsilon's data with Influential's data points, it can forge stronger connections between brands, creators and consumers.
Learn more: Influencer Marketing: Building a Bridge Between B2B Brands and Authentic Connections
Stagwell Adds LEADERS and InfluencerMarketing.AI
Stagwell's acquisitions of LEADERS and IMAI are intended to strengthen the capabilities it offers marketers through the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. By integrating influencer marketing into a platform that already includes tools for PR and media, Stagwell makes influencer strategies more accessible to users.
IMAI also leverages AI to help connect marketers and creators around the world. Notable users of the SaaS platform on the brand side include Coca-Cola, Estee Lauder, and Super Dry.
Why we care: Influencer marketing is big business right now. According to Publicis, it's the fastest growing segment of social media marketing. By next year, Publicis expects $186 billion to be spent on social media marketing, which would mark the first time that social media has surpassed global linear TV ad spend.
Social media and influencer spend wouldn't be as high as it is if marketers couldn't scale their efforts. It takes time to find creators, engage with them, and agree to terms. Influencer marketing platforms are a shortcut that speeds up the process of finding creators and planning, launching, and monitoring campaigns.
Influential and IMAI are not the first influencer platforms to be acquired: Meltwater acquired Klear and Triller acquired Julius in 2023. MarkNtel Advisors values the global influencer marketing platforms market at $14.1 billion in 2024 and projects it to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 38% from 2024 to 2030.
