You & Mr Jones takes majority stake in Oliver and Inside Ideas Group
You & Mr Jones has acquired agency Oliver and its parent firm Inside Ideas Group as a means of building up its clients’ in-house digital capabilities.
You & Mr Jones takes majority stake in Oliver and Inside Ideas Group
Brandtech group You & Mr Jones was founded in 2015 by former Havas chief David Jones with a warchest of $350m to build new martech products. On Thursday 10 January, it announced the completion of the Inside Ideas Group acquisition deal although it did not disclose the fee.
The Inside Ideas Group is comprised of Oliver, Dare, Adjust Your Set and Aylesworth Fleming and boasts 1,500 staff, split in to 146 in-house teams in 36 countries. The acquisition brings $150m of annual revenue into You & Mr Jones, as well as clients including Adidas, Marriott, BMW, Microsoft, Virgin Media, 3M, Barclaycard, Google, The Guardian, PepsiCo, AXA and Manulife.
Most notable is Oliver’s partnership with Unilever’s U-Studios team, helping support in-house operations and reportedly aiding savings of 30% less than external agency work.
David Jones, founder and chief executive of You & Mr Jones, said: “When we launched in 2015, we set out to disrupt marketing using technology and to create a brand-new model for clients. Simon is a brilliant talent and with Oliver he's created an equally disruptive model that's delivering brilliant creativity in-house and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in savings for global brands.”
“Plugging Oliver’s in-house model – and its sophisticated content creation and management technology platform – into our You & Mr Jones tech ecosystem is a very powerful combination. Together, we can create enterprise-level marketing solutions at an unprecedented scale and transform profoundly how a brand does its marketing.”
Simon Martin, founder and chief executive Oliver and Inside Ideas Group added: “We're excited to be joining a group that enables our clients to tap into a broad range of amazing tech-led products and capabilities. We already offer brand marketers a totally new in-house creative model – now they will also be able to access a wider spectrum of the most advanced and innovative marketing technology solutions.
“We had a great deal of interest in our business, but for us, the opportunity to be part of a brandtech group and to connect our in-house model to the world's leading marketing technology platform, was by far the most interesting.”
The group’s clients include Airbnb, Accenture, Unilever, Uber, Richemont, Coty, Diageo, Samsung, Renault, Sainsbury’s, Danone, BNP Paribas, General Motors & LVMH. It has previously invested in 39 Pinterest, Niantic, Amino, Automat, AI Foundation, Evrythng, Mofilm and theAmplify.
Last year You & Mr Jones snapped up Bafta-award winning firm Gravity Road.