The business of knowing the right people has always been valuable on Madison Avenue, though the definition of "the right people" has shifted somewhat since the days when that meant knowing which creative director to call at Doyle Dane Bernbach.
Residence, a Los Angeles-based network of creative companies, has acquired GateMaker, an influencer marketing agency founded in 2021 by Ashton Wall and Amelia Soohoo. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
GateMaker, which is all of four years old, has assembled a client roster that includes Estée Lauder Companies, Glossier, L'Occitane en Provence, Milk Makeup, NARS, Reebok, Starbucks, and the electronics giant LG. The acquisition follows Residence's purchase earlier this year of OK Cool, a creative social agency, suggesting that the company is building something of a collection in the creator economy space — or, to use the preferred industry terminology, "the creator economy."
"GateMaker has built something rare in the creator and influencer economy: real relationships and the discipline to activate them at scale," said Ryan Honey, the chief executive of Residence, in a statement that contained both the word "relationships" and the word "scale," which is the influencer marketing equivalent of saying a restaurant has both food and tables.
Residence, which maintains offices in New York, Sydney, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Vancouver, counts Airbnb, Microsoft, JPMorgan, and Meta among its clients. Its network includes Buck, the design and production studio; It's Nice That, the design publication; and Giant Ant, the animation company.
(Whether an agency that specializes in real relationships will find those relationships altered by becoming part of a global network remains, as always, to be seen.)
The acquisition continues a pattern of consolidation in the influencer sector, where independence has become something of a phase.
Original story published in MediaPost: "Residence Acquires Influencer Agency GateMaker"