Who doesn’t know that doleful tune, “The agencies they are a-changin’.”
That’s not exactly how Bob Dylan sang it in the original, but it’s not wrong.
One such agency is Marketbridge, a 35-year-old B2B marketing firm that’s been a recent acquirer of agency and consultancy services businesses. Marketbridge added to its portfolio on Tuesday by announcing its acquisition of Channel99, a B2B advertising and attribution tech company.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Channel99 was founded in 2022 by Chris Golec, who was also founder and CEO of incumbent B2B demand-side platform Demandbase. But Channel99 isn’t quite a DSP, at least not in the open web programmatic sense. It spans platforms instead; Microsoft/LinkedIn, the Googleverse, Meta and other hubs of business media and influence.
One important gap that Channel99 fills in this services stack, according to Marketbridge CEO Bob Ray, is as an agentic search analytics provider. It helps its clients answer queries like, “How does one company’s services rank in LLM chatbot responses compared to competitors?” or “How do paid media and marketing tactics in other channels affect performance in agentic or generative search platforms?”
These are the types of questions that Channel99 has software to address, Ray said. The next step will be creating an attribution framework to help understand how agentic performance contributes to sales or conversions, much like a media buyer would measure any other channel.
Anything but a holdco
But how did the deal come about between Marketbridge, with its stable of consultancies and agencies, and an indie tech startup like Channel99?
Ray told AdExchanger that he and Golec are old acquaintances. They overlapped at media and marketing agency DWA, which was acquired by Dentsu in 2017 as Merkle’s B2B arm. They also live in the same Bay Area community in Marin.
“This is a people-based business,” Ray said. And as the two recently discussed their respective businesses, he said, they came to the same conclusion that independent technology companies are struggling right now for “relevance” with the large platforms and big clients.
Now, Marketbridge owns its first true technology business. Its model to date has been to acquire agency or consulting shops to fill particular needs and reach certain specific markets, such as an influencer agency, a media agency, a PR and comms agency and an analytics consultancy.
Marketbridge’s acquisitions are centralized and nonduplicative, Ray said. That is different than the traditional holding company model, which is to acquire agencies but generally let them operate independently.
“I would think of it as a ‘next-gen integrated agency consulting company,’” he said. (The phrasing could use some branding work.)
As Ray talked about indie tech companies’ “barriers to growth” and said the two CEOs had “come to the same conclusion” that Channel99 needed to be part of a larger services group, Golec’s face displayed more of a grimace than any sign of agreement.
What persuaded him, Golec said, was Ray’s “passion around becoming a technology-enabled service company.”
The two have already pitched enterprise companies together and partnered on events, he said.
But it took more than just Marketbridge’s embrace of tech ownership and Channel99’s attribution data to get the deal done.
“I was moaning and groaning,” Golec said, “about, ‘God, how I need to get scale with the sales and marketing organization and go raise a bunch of money.’”
That unappealing prospect puts a shine on the alternatives.
“In a way,” Golec said, “this alignment gives us both speed in the marketplace.”
