Content Analytics Company MarketCast Fills Funnel with Acquisition of Phoenix Marketing

Brands want to know they have the most effective creative to drive sales, but they also want to understand how their brand is perceived by their customers. Traditional approaches have lacked the precision of performance marketing techniques and are losing their edge in a world of cookie depreciation. Market research firm MarketCast wants to position itself as the solution to this challenge, as increased digitization and privacy concerns are collapsing the distinction between the upper and lower funnel. To that end, MarketCast—which got its start helping Hollywood studios ensure their movie trailers resonated—is acquiring Phoenix Marketing International in a deal worth around $150 million, according to a company spokesperson. Phoenix focuses on more down-funnel advertising analytics, like conversion, complementing MarketCast’s upper-funnel specialty, like awareness. Phoenix will also bring new industries to MarketCast, such as financial services and telecom, giving the combined entity scale to compete in the crowded ad-tech market. “The first- and third-party big data is good at telling you what happened,” said MarketCast CEO John Batter. “The primary research is good at telling you why it happened.” Through the acquisition of Phoenix and other deals over the past few years, MarketCast hopes to be the source of both levers for brands. Global Digital Consumer Trends Index Reveals Privacy, Messaging and Loyalty Insights The deal is transformational—employee head count will now be 700; Phoenix adds 400 employees to MarketCast’s 300. MarketCast has been on an acquisition spree to bring more tech and lower-funnel data into its classic market research niche—notably acquiring data-science company Deductive in 2020. The acquisition brought in attribution products, connecting audience data around who watched a given ad to retail sales behavior data. But the Phoenix acquisition is one of the largest for 35-year-old MarketCast which is owned by private equity firm Kohlberg & Company. MarketCast is making the acquisition in a frothy M&A market, said Matt Prohaska, CEO and principal of Prohaska Consulting. He predicts more ad tech M&A, with numerous companies offering privacy solutions, and a depressed IPO market, providing less opportunity for public exits. "It's a good time to be selling companies," he said. MarketCast is big in Hollywood. It got its start testing the trailers for Academy Award-winning films Silence of the Lambs and Dances with Wolves. Big clients include NBCUniversal, the NFL, Meta and AB InBev. Phoenix brings big names like Comcast, Ford, AT&T, Fidelity and Verizon. “There wasn’t a lot of overlapping clients,” said MarketCast CMO Graham McKenna. Measurement has been a hot area of ad tech as the fragmented landscape of convergent TV upends traditional marketing frameworks. MarketCast doesn’t seek to compete with companies like iSpot.TV, which track impressions, but with companies like Kantar and Nielsen, which help brands make data-driven creative decisions. “We honed our skill at helping our clients create messaging around a big worldwide event,” Batter said. As advertisers seek new solutions for the fractured measurement and analytics landscape, tools like MarketCast add value, said Kelly Abcarian, evp measurement & impact, advertising and partnerships at NBCU, a client of MarketCast’s. “The new combined offering sets the stage for building enhanced ad impact measurement across platforms – which is something the industry needs,” Abcarian said. NBCU Expands Programmatic to Live Events and Sports, Adds Creative Targeting