Rockworth Management Partners Limited

Our experience in the Marketing Services sectors across M&A & inward investments

As Marketing Services corporate finance and strategic growth advisors, we have worked with a range of specialist and multi-disciplinary companies across the full breadth of the industry.

We’ve worked with companies with expertise in the following areas:

  • advertising
  • B2B and B2C events and experiential marketing
  • behavioural economics and consumer psychology
  • brand design and development
  • data analytics
  • digital marketing and SEO
  • e-commerce
  • field marketing
  • market research
  • marketing communications
  • offline & digital shopper marketing
  • packaging design
  • print marketing
  • professional photography
  • public relations
  • retail display design
  • strategy and planning
  • stationary and collateral design
  • mobile web design and UX design

Drivers of M&A in Marketing Services 

The large marketing and communication networks use M&A to accelerate growth and bring the latest thinking to their more established operations.

In turn, entrepreneurial owners very often seek the umbrella of a larger organisation to bring geographic expansion and the bundling of capabilities, helping them better serve clients and win new ones. This can also allow the entrepreneur to return to the work they are passionate about, whilst supporting the direction of the company under its new owner.  

More recently we have seen a significant shift towards acquisitions being dominated by private equity and professional services firms and consultancies.

Acquiror Insights

If there is a common thread amongst the hundreds of prospective acquirers we talk to in Marketing Services, it is the desire to acquire businesses that can help build a genuine dialogue with customers and therefore create strength and longevity in their relationships.

As a result, we see continued acquiror appetite for Marketing Services companies with traditional expertise, such as print design, retail display and shopper marketing, to bring a capability in-house and strengthen customer relationships.

In the digital marketing, robust growth, scale and high market fragmentation has buoyed M&A appetite from acquirors to “future-proof” and expand into this growing area. Similarly, Marketing Services companies that have developed niche technologies and IP are also being targeted as brands want more individualised features and meaningful data on consumer behaviour.