Publicis Groupe, the worlds’ third largest communication group, has agreed to acquire data marketing company Epsilon from Alliance Data Systems Corporation for a total cash consideration of $4.4 billion. This is one of the marketing services industry’s biggest ever deals.
Arthur Sadoun, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, said “Our clients are facing increasing pressure from the rise in consumer expectations, the mainstreaming of direct-to-consumer brands and new data regulations. The only response is to deliver personalised experiences at scale. They have to transform to meet this new market imperative.”
“With the acquisition of Epsilon, Publicis Groupe is bringing the necessary technology, expertise and the talent to complement our offer in creativity, media and business transformation, and help our clients leapfrog their competition and grow profitably.”
Headquartered in the US, Epsilon is a technology and platform company focused on maximizing the value of its clients’ data.
It generated $1.9 billion of net revenue, 97% in the US. With approximately 9,000 employees, including 3,700 data scientists and 2,000 Bangalore-based technology delivery experts, Epsilon works across the entire data lifecycle from clients’ first-party raw data to personalised marketing campaigns, to onboard clients’ first-party data and enrich it with Epsilon proprietary data assets, (demographic and contact, behavioral and transactional, online and offline data).
This enables the company to build unique ID customer profiles based on enriched data and AI for segmentation and analytics and activate the data to deliver personalised multi-channel campaigns with measurement and real-time optimisation.
Epsilon, which generated revenues of $2.2bn in 2018 (down 4% year-on-year), is owned by Alliance Data Systems Corporation, and as well as acquiring the Epsilon business Publicis has announced that it is now entering into a strategic partnership with Alliance Data’s remaining business.
Publicis say this will accelerate the implementation of its strategy to become the preferred transformation partner for its clients.
