The direct response business has always been about finding the shortest distance between a sales pitch and a ringing cash register. For a quarter-century, Chief Media has been helping clients navigate that path, first through television and radio, then through the thickets of programmatic buying and data analytics.
Now the independent agency is adding two more arrows to its quiver.
Chief Media has acquired AMZ Advisers, a consultancy focused on Amazon, and Reach Social, a social media agency. The terms were not disclosed, which is the customary way of saying that neither party wanted you to know.
The acquisitions reflect a broader movement among agencies to bolster their credentials in retail media and marketplace commerce, areas that have grown from afterthoughts into significant line items on many clients' media plans. For Chief Media, which counts the supplement brand Force Factor, the candy company Albanese and AS Beauty among its clients, the deals offer what Scott Paternoster, the chief executive, described as an opportunity to cross-sell services.
(In agency parlance, "cross-selling" is the art of persuading a client who came in for one thing that they really need three other things as well.)
Chief Media's roots in direct response — the branch of advertising concerned less with brand poetry than with whether the phone actually rings — position it as a natural home for performance-minded e-commerce work. The Amazon and social acquisitions extend that sensibility into the digital bazaars where much of that selling now takes place.
Whether the deals will prove shrewd depends, as these things usually do, on execution and timing. But for an independent agency approaching its silver anniversary, the moves suggest a certain confidence that the old direct response instincts still have their uses in the new retail landscape.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Performance Agency Chief Media Acquires 2 Firms to Beef up Amazon and TikTok Expertise"