Apart from the Philadelphia Eagles, one of the big winners of Super Bowl LIX was Stagwell, the holding company whose agencies crafted some of the big game’s best ads and most engaging off-the-field brand experiences. Stagwell’s 72andSunny was behind a pair of purpose-driven spots for the NFL, while the group’s Anomaly teamed Post Malone, Shane Gillis and Peyton Manning for an epic cul-de-sac party. The spots — three of the top ten efforts in USA Today's Ad Meter — could serve as a weather vane for the direction of creative in 2025.
“People are largely going back to business and to the universal causes that everybody subscribes to,” Stagwell Chairman and CEO Mark Penn said. “The work for the NFL was particularly in line with what I like to see in good Super Bowl advertising, and I thought that Bud Light is really coming back. Some people have to just get back to their basic roots; that's what Bud Light has been successfully doing.”
Anomaly also helped Starbucks advertise around the game with a highly anticipated campaign that the chain hopes will help it reintroduce its embattled brand to consumers. Instructively, it was also Anomaly’s first work for the brand since taking over creative from WPP — a move announced in January, just months after WPP created a bespoke unit for the account.
The surprising switch-up is the type of win that Stagwell and its subsidiaries have looked to rack up as the company continues to establish itself as a challenger to legacy holding companies. The approach is working: Stagwell saw growth across its business areas in Q3 2024, led by 25% growth in digital transformation and 30% growth in its marketing cloud group.
Ahead of Stagwell’s announcement of Q4 and FY24 earnings on Feb. 27, Marketing Dive caught up with Penn about the company’s approach to mergers and acquisitions, data and artificial intelligence (AI) at a moment when the Omnicom-IPG merger could put its challenger proposition in sharper relief.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: Stagwell recently continued its acquisitive streak with a deal for Gold Rabbit Sports. How are you approaching M&A at this juncture?
MARK PENN: I always say that we're a teenager on the way up, so acquisitions continue to be a very strong part of our strategy, particularly expanding into new regions. We've done a lot of overseas acquisitions in the last year, making sure that we're on the frontiers of technology with acquisitions like Left Field Labs. Those two elements — being on the frontier of new marketing and expanding our global chops — are really the two areas where we're focusing, but we are definitely continuing to aggressively invest in the [sports] area.
How is Stagwell’s positioning as an alternative to the traditional holding companies affected by the Omnicom-IPG merger plans?
I don't think that marketers are sitting there saying that they want another behemoth. I think they're sitting there saying they want another Stagwell. They want fourth-generation creative, more digital agencies, more ability to use social media.
They're looking a lot more now at the offerings that we've been putting together at Stagwell, because I think our acquisitions and building blocks are fresh, new and modern, whereas the behemoths are having to really wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars of retro agencies that can't really find a spot in the market anymore.
We're on the way up, they're on the way somewhat down... We're in the position that we want to be as the challenger holding company.
Can you tell me more about Stagwell ID Graph and the AI-based content development platform that you’re calling the Machine?
We provide core marketing services, data and media and digital transformation. In core marketing services, we're broadening the geography and making sure that we're got the right social content to balance the other content machines. In data and media, we have a very extensive global network that is performance-led in many ways.
We're building out more extended data underpinning to refine and improve our offerings with the ID graph, which utilizes a lot of our own proprietary data, and the Machine, which is a combination of us and Adobe, to manage the flood of content that a modern marketing campaign really has today. Those two things are really going to enhance [our offering]. We think they're months away, not years away.
Where do you see marketers in the journey of incorporating AI, amid this rush to see what works and what doesn't?
We're really at relatively early stages of full incorporation of AI. AI is still figuring out what it can do and what its capabilities are as they continue to improve. We have a jump on that, because we already had set up a central innovation group several years ago. We have our own [chief technology officer] and engineering team [to focus on] internal innovation at scale. That gives us a real leg up in terms of our ability to integrate AI into the key areas where you're going to see it, which is content development and refining the use of data.
What do recent account wins by Anomaly and 72andSunny say about Stagwell’s offering and how it meets marketers’ needs?
A lot of those wins confirm our strategy, that creativity is important, that it's the right combination of creativity and technology that gives you a winning campaign. As we've seen the majors try to de-emphasize creativity, our offerings — really being post-Madison Avenue — have been on a very solid roll.
People see that we have broad global capabilities now — no one else really has been able to get to our size with this speed — to provide these kinds of capabilities. That's being increasingly recognized in the marketplace, and it's reflected in a string of very significant wins.
