Publicis Groupe Announces Enguage Acquisition

Publicis Groupe announced today the acquisition of Engauge Marketing LLC, the advertising and digital services agency based in Columbus, Ohio. Halyard Capital, a New Yorkbased private equity firm was the majority owner of Engauge Marketing. 

Engauge provides full-service advertising and digital services with a burgeoning social marketing practice to more than 30 clients, including Nationwide Insurance, Cisco Systems, and The Coca-Cola Company. The agency has offices in Columbus, Ohio; Atlanta, Ga.; Orlando, Fla.; 
and Pittsburgh, Pa. and an employee base of more than 250 people.

Launched in 2007, Engauge was formed from the union of Ten United, a Columbus-based advertising agency with offices in Pittsburgh and Orlando; Spunlogic, a digital marketing services company in Atlanta; and Direct Impact, a data analytics and CRM company in Austin, Texas. These combined areas of expertise have given Engauge a strong position in an increasingly digitally-driven advertising services sector.

Engauge Marketing will become part of the ZenithOptimedia Group in the United States and will be aligned with Moxie, the Group’s digital advertising agency based in Atlanta. ZenithOptimedia Group will look to maximize operational synergies and complementary capabilities across the two organizations while maintaining the Engauge and Moxie brands 
in the marketplace.

Combined, Moxie and Engauge will have more than 600 employees and will comprise the largest array of digital marketing resources in the Southeast. These two leading digital companies will offer clients a fullyintegrated advertising and digital organization with innovative services and solutions in the areas of strategy, creative, social marketing, media, data analytics and technology development.

Nick Bandy, CEO of Engauge said: “Over the past year, the leadership team of Engauge has explored ways to meet the challenges of the evolving and increasingly complex marketing landscape to ultimately help with our clients’ continued success. Through this discovery work we entered discussions with multiple companies across the advertising business. Where we found most accord and alignment with our mutual goals was with Publicis Groupe. We believe this change in ownership will enable us to meet our goals, provide long-term stability to our company, give access to world-class marketing resources, products, tools and apps, research, data and insight capability and, of course, access to a substantial talent pool across the world which for our people presents greatly enhanced career opportunities”.

Suzy Deering, CEO of Moxie, added: “By fusing Engauge’s expertise in social marketing together
with Moxie’s capabilities and resources, we will be able to provide our clients with a stronger, multichannel, geographically-diverse company that is able to offer the best services and solutions all under one roof.”

Tim Jones, CEO of ZenithOptimedia Group, North America said: “This union expands the range of communication services we can provide to clients, particularly in social marketing and content marketing. Our digital operations in Atlanta are now market-leading in scale and in depth of resources. We’re excited by the range of resources this provides as we look to the future.”