Interpublic Group Buys Retail Analytics Company in Deal Valued at Nearly $100 Million
Intelligence Node expands the ad holding company’s commerce and retail media offerings
Advertising holding company Interpublic Group has acquired Intelligence Node, a Mumbai-based retail analytics firm that helps brands better compete for online sales.
The deal was valued at nearly $100 million including integration costs, according to people familiar with the matter.
Intelligence Node, which was founded in 2012 and employs more than 120 people, works with both brands and retailers. It aims to help those companies understand shopper trends and drive sales by providing them with data to inform their decisions in areas including product development, marketing and sales.
Nearly real-time data about pricing, promotions and availability is important for marketers that want to compete online. If a brand sees a certain competitor’s product is out of stock on a given site, for example, it might make certain strategic moves to capitalize off that.
“If your competitor is currently not there, we want to be spending maybe three times what we would normally spend, or maybe we want to be adjusting the price based on the fact that the competition is low,” said Jarrod Martin, chief executive of Kinesso, the marketing intelligence and engineering arm of IPG, as well as the CEO of IPG’s Acxiom data unit.
Ad holding companies have been amping up their commerce offerings as brands increasingly seek more direct relationships with consumers as well as tools to succeed in digital and physical stores. E-commerce and retail media, in which businesses such as grocery and big-box chains offer advertisers ways to reach consumers using customer data, have both seen substantial growth in recent years.
IPG’s competitors have made major plays in the commerce space. Omnicom Group last year said it would buy digital commerce company Flywheel Digital for a net cash purchase price of about $835 million, while Publicis Groupe bought Mars United Commerce, a commerce marketing agency, in a deal valuing Mars at around $600 million.
IPG, which owns agency groups such as McCann Worldgroup and IPG Mediabrands, already has strong consumer data through its Acxiom unit, according to Martin. IPG acquired that business for $2.3 billion in 2018.
“But what we’ve been missing is product and commerce data at scale that we can use to augment that consumer data,” Martin said.
IPG has been working to improve its overall performance, which has suffered the past year from a pullback in spending from tech clients, client losses and underperformance from its tech agencies. The company said during its October earnings call that it hoped mergers and acquisitions in the commerce space would help drive growth, among other changes and initiatives.
“We see strategic opportunity in specialized data assets in commerce and retail media—also, companies with retail media technology platforms and reach, given that’s a sector that’s growing quickly and should continue to thrive,” IPG Chief Executive Philippe Krakowsky said on the call.