Kyu
Rick Greenberg, CEO of Kepler and Michael Birkin CEO ofkyu.
- The kyu Collective, a four-year old
advertising holding company, is buying a majority stake in the media buying agency The Kepler Group. - Kepler Group is one of a new breed of agencies built for the data-driven programmatic era.
- "They are a 'Moneyball' agency," said one observer.
The kyu Collective, a division of the Japanese marketing and communications conglomerate Hakuhodo DY Holdings, has reached an agreement to acquire a majority stake in The Kepler Group, a six-year-old ad agency that specializes in data and software-driven ad buying.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Kepler Group is part of an emerging breed of ad firm that have come of age during the programmatic ad buying era. Unlike classic ad agencies known for making and placing ads, the startup boasts of its own proprietary data integration platform designed to help marketers like American Express and J. Crew target and acquire customers.
"They are one of the first agencies started around the idea of programmatic," said Todd Sawicki, CEO of the ad tech company Zemanta. "They are a 'Moneyball' agency."
That means using analytics and technology to dictate client strategy, Sawicki said. "
If Billy Beane [the data-forward baseball executive famously played by Brad Pitt in "Moneyball"] was going to start an agency, then this is probably what it would look like," he said.
The kyu Collective is built to be a nimble alternative to giant ad agency holding companies like WPP or Publicis, which have struggled to maintain robust growth in the digital ad era. Launched in 2014, it has spent the past few years making a string of acquisitions in the marketing sector such as the consulting firm Sy Partners and the design shop IDEO.
CEO Michael Birkin said the strategy is to try and identify upstarts in different advertising categories.
"We see this as a carefully curated group of firms who can explore how collectively we can work together," he told Business Insider. "Kepler is a disrupter in its category and that's what we need."
Smaller is better, given the current climate, he said. "Our approach is not the panacea to everybody's problems in the ad industry but does have a different flavor," he said. For kyu's partners, "being deal number 1500 is not as motivating as being deal number four. We tell them, 'You'll be part of executing this [vision]."
That dynamic appealed to Kepler CEO Rick Greenberg, along with the potential to operate more globally. Since launching primarily as a digital ad firm, he said Kepler company has increasingly expanded into other media.
Traditional ad agencies offer "a different service than what media buying is today," he said. "Today media is about dynamic trading and optimization. We are marketers using technology, yet all the classic rules of marketing apply."
"But the objective is to have impact on your client's business," he said.