As the largest US independent performance marketing company, Tinuiti would manage nearly $3 billion in media spend for clients

Tinuiti, the largest independent performance marketing agency in the US, announced the execution of a definitive agreement to acquire a leading purchaser of digital streaming media, Bliss Point Media, and its subsidiary, Prospect Point Media. The Santa Monica-based company provides a patented machine-learning technology to accurately measure and optimize performance for leading brands like Fabletics, Instacart, Square, Thumbtack and Tonal.

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The deal will allow Tinuiti to accelerate its offering in OTT / cTV and reintroduce Tinuiti’s OTT division as Streaming+. This performance-first, full-service offering will offer scalable, targetable, data driven optimization across OTT, Linear, TV, Streaming TV and Digital Audio, to its clients and the industry at large. Streaming+ combines the strengths of both Tinuiti and Bliss Point practices to deliver the most value from media spend across such partners as Discover, Disney, NBCU and ViacomCBS. This offering will be enabled by a technology platform that gives control and transparency back to marketers.

Zach Morrison, CEO, Tinuiti said: “All digital is measurable and performance marketing is a critical piece of connecting brands with consumers who have shifted to digital. Brands who take a performance-first approach to connecting their audiences with greater, targeted immersive experiences, will conquer this next consumer and digital frontier. Bliss Point’s and Tinuiti’s combined capabilities and technologies will give brands a truly differentiated full-service offering rooted in proprietary and patented machine-learning technology, attribution and econometrics. Marketers will be able to scale this service from the small screens of Google, Facebook and Amazon to the big screens of TV – OTT, cTV and linear.”

Bliss Point’s proprietary and patented machine learning technology will be integrated into Tinuiti’s suite of AI-enabled marketing intelligence and media activation technology, Mobius. These technologies will enhance Mobius’ OTT/cTV capabilities to make non-click-based media trackable, attributable, and optimizable, delivering accelerated growth for client brands and marketers. Bliss Point CEO Sean Odlum will join Tinuiti’s executive team and board of directors to play a key role in strategic product development. 

Sean Odlum, CEO, Bliss Point Media said:  “Since 2014, Bliss Point has focused on growth marketing challenges where great solutions are scarce and where technology, in particular measurement technology, can make a significant difference. Having come up as a performance marketer myself, we’ve approached everything — technology decisions, product design, service delivery, the team we’ve assembled — from the point of view of a growth marketer who is responsible for delivering tangible, quantifiable results. As marketers’ roles become more complex by the day with media fragmentation and walled gardens, we find this partnership with Tinuiti incredibly exciting to offer our clients even better technology-enabled solutions across the full breadth of their portfolios.”

This deal will mark the second acquisition in 2021 for Tinuiti, following the purchase of The Ortega Group in March. In December 2020, Tinuiti announced a partnership with New Mountain Capital, a leading growth-oriented investment firm with over $30 billion in assets under management.

Both Tinuiti and Bliss Point are experiencing rapid growth disrupting the traditional holding company and other current agency models, with Tinuiti growing five times in size since 2017, and Bliss Point growing over 200% year-over-year. Across division teams, Tinuiti and Bliss Point have approximately 100 current active job openings. Since March 2020, Tinuiti’s workforce grew by 25% to over 860 employees. During the same time period, Bliss Point has tripled in size to nearly 100 employees.

The acquisition is being facilitated by New Mountain Capital. Canaccord Genuity is acting as an advisor to Tinuiti on the transaction, while GP Bullhound is acting as sole financial advisor to Bliss Point Media on the transaction. Ropes & Gray LLP is serving as legal counsel to New Mountain Capital and Tinuiti on the transaction, and Cooley LLP is serving as legal counsel to Bliss Point Media. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021, subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals.

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