MSQ Acquires PRECIOUS Media and Wooshii, Marking Significant Production Expansion

M3 Labs, MSQ's production agency, has acquired London-based agencies PRECIOUS Media and Wooshii as part of a move to expand its global, end-to-end AI and people-powered creative production offer.

Launched in 2024, M3 Labs helps businesses 'make, manage and measure' their marketing content, aiming to deliver culturally-relevant work faster and more effectively. Earlier this year, MSQ merged its creative studio Brave Spark into M3 Labs to consolidate this offer.

PRECIOUS Media, established in 2007, specialises in connected commerce, joining up clients' digital ecosystems and driving international sales for brands including Diageo, Hilton, Unilever and MARS. It will retain its agency brand but transition to M3 Labs over time.

Wooshii, launched in 2009, combines AI and data with a global video production network of around 16,000 vetted creators across 132 countries. The production side of Wooshii will rebrand and integrate into M3 Labs, while its AI-powered creative services products will remain independent under the Wooshii brand.

The acquisitions bring M3 Labs' total headcount to 130, operating across London, Germany, Singapore, New York, Dubai and KSA, with offshore hubs in Spain and India. These teams will collaborate under a shared leadership structure, aiming to deliver personalised content at scale and speed across all channels, supported by MSQ's wider data, media and digital experience teams.

Under the new structure, M3 Labs chairman Mark Cramphorn and managing director Rebecca Vickery will be joined by Wooshii CEO Fergus Dyer-Smith, COO Darryl Newton and PRECIOUS Media director Peter Christiansen, all reporting to Kate Howe, executive director at MSQ, who leads M3 Labs.

Kate said the acquisitions bring "real depth in global production, tech enabled products and e-commerce with experienced innovative industry leadership.

"With some of the best tech innovators in the market, Wooshii is at the cutting edge of the use of AI to transform creative services – which we will rapidly embed across our business. With our investment, scale and existing capabilities in this area, together we can reach higher, further and faster while ensuring the huge importance of craft and human insight is built in at every step."

She described the dual acquisition as a significant milestone in MSQ’s evolution, enhancing the production element of its end-to-end brand platform.

Kate told LBB that PRECIOUS stood out for its ability to deliver high-quality, brand-led creative that drives conversion: "The work that PRECIOUS Media does is gorgeous. It's beautifully creative. It keeps the brand creative flame alive all the way through the funnel, right the way to the conversion point. And it's highly effective."

She also praised PRECIOUS for its ability to work as a strategic partner at every level of the funnel: "Quite often you find that the people producing content aren't sitting at the top table with clients, involved in their business outcomes, but these guys are. Peter is absolutely playing that role with his clients. It's where we want to be - as genuinely commercial partners to our clients."

Kate described Wooshii’s AI tools as "world class" and said they would improve MSQ's internal operations and enhance partnerships with clients' in-house teams. "In a lot of the work we're doing to support clients with their own in-house departments, the way that we partner with them, we'll be able to share the technology and it will simply make them better."

"As a direct result of the enhanced offer, we will have best-in-class content creation in a way that we didn't have before. It's global, it's working already with four of the world's biggest brands or brand owners - Unilever, Mars, Diageo and Hilton - making a genuine difference." She added: "We have a proven innovative, commercially-impactful AI product that can improve the processes and efficiencies that get us from brief all the way to production."

She argued that MSQ’s size allows it to invest in AI more nimbly than larger networks. "We aren't as scaled as some of the big holdcos. We think that that's our advantage, but it also means that we can make fast, very nimble decisions and investments that we see as being hugely impactful for clients, and also supporting the way our own people work."

Kate positioned production as a key supporting pillar of the modern marketing platform, on equal footing with strategy, creative and media. "My view is that where we used to have strategy, creative and media, we now have to think of production as that fourth leg of the chair. And that the four of them have equal prominence."

She framed the move as a strategic leap forward for MSQ. "We've got to the point where we've got genuinely equal strengths in each of those pillars now. That's why it's such an exciting development for us, and such a strategically important one."

Blending AI Workflows with Craft

Speaking of the value the acquisition brings to Wooshii, Fergus said: "MSQ brings scale, an international footprint and the opportunity to keep ahead of technological advances through continued investment to Wooshii."

He noted that MSQ’s backing will further accelerate growth of Wooshii’s proprietary products. "We were doing pretty well already, but now we've got a much better platform, and we can invest in them further and continue to grow them."

Fergus said Wooshii was built around scalable, AI-enabled workflows — making it a natural fit for modern agency models. "We actually didn't start off life as a traditional production business at all. We predominantly were built for scale, built around a network, built around technology. AI is not a bolt on for us. It was built inherently inside the business. We've developed corporate, proprietary AI products that are going to allow us to continue to run pretty independently. M3 Labs is getting a big enhancement to its production capability globally, along with access to these fantastic proprietary AI products that work within marketing agencies."

According to Fergus, streamlined production processes are now as vital as the creative output itself. "Creating great content is table stakes for production businesses,” he said. “But the process, especially now, is ever more important." Wooshii’s model spans high-end TVCs, quick-turn educational content, and scalable output – blending AI with craft across all.

He added that the fluid nature of production made integrating with new teams and company cultures less challenging. "It's a very fluid industry. So you're very used to working with one team and then switching to working with another team. So that makes it slightly easier."

The acquisition, he added, gives MSQ a future-ready production capability that can scale, personalise and integrate AI by design. "They've now got an entity here that can support them and deliver in a fashion that's fit for what's coming. So whether that’s having to scale out content, personalise content, or using AI in their day to day to manage their operations, this is now there for them, and it's natively built into the business. It hasn't just been bolted on so that we can tick a box and put out a piece of marketing. It's inherent in what we do.”

Connected Commerce

From PRECIOUS Media's perspective, MD Peter Christiansen laid out why MSQ clients stand to benefit from the acquisition: "In an ever-evolving digital environment, it's becoming increasingly important for agencies to deliver solutions that actually deliver sales (kind of the important part of business). We like to say that we operate in the intersection of content and commerce. Most global FMCG brands realise the importance of selling in the digital environment, and you can't do that as a single channel anymore. You need to have an integrated ecosystem. We call it connected commerce, effectively connecting the dots. We are experts in that, and recognised in that field. 

For Peter's business, MSQ was a neat fit. "We already have a lot of those client names you would recognise from MSQ already as big anchor clients of ours," he said. "So it's exciting for us to coming in to scale and join the dots in that respect. MSQ's joined-up thinking fits us very well, because we are really connecting the way they see us. There's our production solutions, there are the AI components now coming in [from Wooshii], there's a significant amount of strategy involved. And we need to deliver that bit in the middle, allowing brands to sell their products at scale in the digital world.

"Whether that is consumers that shop in store and then go online, or browse online and then go in store. Brands have to cater to them. and that's where we come in. We produce a lot of content. And hence it was very interesting to join the modern revolution in content creation, to bring that cutting edge expertise to it.

PRECIOUS Media joining the larger entity of MSQ and M3 Labs will bring its clients efficiency of scale and cost-effective delivery. Peter said: "I think we will be very competitive. One of our key sort of USPs will actually be that we can deliver more output, because we're wired for digital and for AI at scale. It's about being more efficient and delivering solutions to clients that they can see drive sales. AI will help in that equation. That genuinely will help our clients.

"For us, it's about scale, being able to speak to clients in a more scalable fashion, and we can be speaking with confidence," he added. "We know what the game plan is. It's about M3 Labs actually sitting in the middle, which I think is a very powerful proposition. A lot of agencies try this. But I think with the amount of people and resources we have to do it, we can very easily and efficiently and fast service this promise. And proof is in the pudding."

In May, MSQ also acquired London-based strategy and innovation consultancy The Forge, continuing its investment in capabilities across the marketing spectrum.

Pictured above: Top row L-R - Mark Cramphorn, chairman, M3 Labs; Rebecca Vickery, MD, M3 Labs; Fergus Dyer-Smith, CEO, Wooshii; bottom row L-R - Darryl Netwon, COO, Wooshii; Kate Howe, executive director, MSQ; Peter Christiansen, director, PRECIOUS Media