Dentsu acquires Leapfrog for more personalized performance marketing

Dive Brief:

Dentsu Aegis Network U.S. acquired performance marketing solutions company Leapfrog Online, also known as Leapfrog, the agency holding group announced in a press release. Leapfrog will be integrated into Dentsu's search and performance marketing agency iProspect. Financial terms of the deal were not released.
Leapfrog's proprietary marketing technology, including its LFX Conversion Platform, and strong specialization in data are expected to improve iProspect's ability to deliver customer experiences in real-time, along with bolstering client-first party data and machine learning capabilities. Specifically, iProspect will now be able to personalize a landing page experience for consumers who click through a search ad, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.
"The consumer journey is not linear or tied to a single channel, but there is always a beginning and an end. This acquisition now makes it possible for us to travel the entire journey — to control the consumer experience all the way to the finish line," said Jeremy Cornfeldt, president of iProspect U.S., in a statement.

Dive Insight:

The deal points to the growing importance of personalized, performance-driven experiences in digital marketing, with Dentsu telling the Journal that its Merkle, iProspect agencies and other data-driven businesses are growing faster than other areas of the company.

Although the martech space has been relatively quiet through the first quarter of 2017, higher level capabilities from cognitive intelligence solutions such as machine learning are at the forefront of where marketing technology is heading. Agencies are increasingly looking to powerful tools that will help them to deliver actionable insights from the wealth of data they collect, and Dentsu's acquisition of Leapfrog might further hone those capabilities.

More major agency holding groups are looking to build out their specializations with data, in particular, especially as competition from global consultancies like Deloitte and Accenture heats up. IPG Mediabrands recently invested tens of millions of dollars of fresh spend into its efforts to build out a more effective data infrastructure, and before that Publicis expanded its pilot program with Microsoft toward similar goals.

Dentsu has been especially active with M&A, with more than 80 acquisitions over the past three and a half years. Last August, it bought a majority stake in Merkle for $1.5 billion, another data-driven deal with Merkle becoming the tenth member of Dentsu’s roster of agencies. As agencies and other digital players look to build out and sharpen their specializations, consolidation and acquisition of smaller, independent shops in the ad tech and marketing technology spaces has continued apace.