MightyHive, the programmatic and data arm under S4 Capital, said Tuesday it has merged with data and analytics firm Digodat in Latin America.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Digodat has more than 40 employees and offices in Argentina, Mexico, Chile and Colombia. The firm expands MightyHive’s Latin American presence beyond Brazil, where it acquired programmatic consultancy ProgMedia last year, and into the region’s Spanish-speaking markets.
Digodat will retire its brand and become part of MightyHive Latin America.
“The Digodat people were high on MightyHive’s list of potential partners,” said S4 Capital founder and executive chairman Sir Martin Sorrell. “Creative and technological talent in Latin America is very strong.”
Digodat works with marketers on site optimization, analytics, data visualization and predictive modeling. Like MightyHive, the company is a certified Google Partner with expertise on Google Analytics, Google Cloud and Google Marketing Platform.
About 80% of Digodat’s services are unique to what MightyHive offers in the region around programmatic, said co-founder and COO Chris Martin. MightyHive will scale Digodat’s proprietary data and analytics tools to its other regions.
“Web analytics and cloud capabilities will power solutions in market, and we’re continuing to trickle down into these areas,” he said. “[Digodat’s] depth in cloud and web analytics is a very nice offset to our non-Spanish speaking countries.”
Digodat’s clients include Telecom Argentina, Banco Galicia, BBVA and Chilean retailer Cencosud. MightyHive’s global clients will be able to access Digodat’s services, and vice versa.
MightyHive will operate Digodat’s services out of Argentina, where it runs its services hub. Digodat co-founder and CEO Alan Daitch will run MightyHive’s data business in Latin America.
Inside S4’s global expansion
Digodat is S4 Capital’s 12th global acquisition since 2018.
The company has merged six content companies into MediaMonks, the global content practice it acquired for $300 million in 2018, and four data companies into programmatic and data practice MightyHive, which it acquired for $150 million the same year.
S4’s strategy has been to snap up relatively small but strategic assets in markets around the world and unify them under a single P&L within the MightyHive and MediaMonks brands. S4 has already merged MightyHive with Delicious Data in APAC to launch MightyHive Korea and ConversionWorks in the United Kingdom to expand MightyHive UK.
“We’re bringing things together so our focus area is across the offers we set out at the beginning: first-party, digital advertising content and programmatic,” Sorrell said. “Everything you see us do is in that strategic framework.”
Unlike its holding company peers, S4 Capital is not allowing the uncertainty caused by COVID-19 slow its global expansion. On the contrary, it sees an opportunity to accelerate “because everybody else is not,” Sorrell said.
S4 has its eye on growing its data capabilities in APAC this year, as well as its expertise on specific platforms such as Google, Adobe and Tencent in the region. It also sees interesting client opportunities in Germany. Latin America, however, is especially appealing because of its deep bench of talent largely untapped outside of the region.
“I think probably people think about it as a continent with more challenges,” Sorrell said. “I think of it as a continent with more opportunities.”
Sorrell hopes S4 can move past the worst impacts of COVID-19 by the end of Q2 as lockdowns ease, and sees data services as more insulated from marketer cutbacks as they’re often funded in part by IT budgets.
“[Marketers] aren’t decreasing their data and analytics budgets,” he said. “Data clean rooms, data lakes, comparing data and getting data in an organized basis is critically important.”
