Independent performance agency Tinuiti is making a bigger push into social with the acquisition of growth marketing shop Ampush on Tuesday.
Tinuiti declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal.
The Ampush acquisition marks Tinuiti’s third in the past two years. In March 2021, Tinuiti scooped up retail media agency The Ortega Group, and it bought streaming TV player Bliss Point Media in August.
The addition of Ampush’s roughly 100 employees brings Tinuiti’s total to just north of 1,200.
Ampush has strength in social, experience with supporting in-house teams at brands and “a heavy emphasis on using data to find unique ways to win through the whole customer activation funnel,” said Ampush CEO Jon Oberlander, who will become EVP of social at Tinuiti.
For example, Ampush tracks a metric it calls “acquisitions per impression” (APM), which is a combination of click-through rate and conversion rate. APM measures “how well we can drive yield from a single impression,” Oberlander said, by following audience exposure to ad creative before someone clicks and the effect of creative after a click across landing pages, quizzes and other curated content.
APM data and other metrics flow into Amp, Ampush’s proprietary data aggregation tool, which gives users the ability to allocate traffic between different landing pages and measure conversion rates throughout the consumer journey.
Instead of relying on a single ROI metric, Oberlander said, clients can make better optimization choices and steer consumers toward different or new products based on the category and price of their first purchase.
Amp will become part of Tinuiti’s Mobius technology platform, which focuses on the retail media ecosystem and cross-channel attribution. Bliss Point’s algorithmic buying technology for tracking and optimizing nonclick media, including streaming and linear television, has already been integrated into Mobius.
All three platforms (Amp, Mobius and Bliss Point) do data aggregation, ingestion and analysis. Together, they’ll help drive better performance for Tinuiti’s clients, said Tinuiti CEO Zach Morrison.
“Performance marketing is measurable marketing,” he said.
Tinuiti’s focus on growth and performance resonated with Unilever, Morrison said. The CPG giant recently selected Tinuiti as the digital marketing agency of record for five of its health and wellness brands: Liquid I.V., OLLY, Onnit, SmartyPants Vitamins and Welly Health PBC.
Despite rumblings of a recession, Morrison said he’s open to making additional acquisitions that bring new capabilities and complement Tinuiti’s existing offerings. For instance, he’s looking at companies with expertise in first-party data, privacy, creative data technology and digital platforms.
But performance is always top of mind, Morrison said, regardless of whether times are good or times are tough.
When it comes to marketing, he said, brands want to know: “Is this a math equation that will work?”
Brands are still trying to find their footing in an era of signal loss, including figuring out which performance tactics to use and diversifying their spending.
“There is a lot of appetite among clients to have strategies that can work on different platforms and trying to find scale on different platforms,” Oberlander said.
