Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Viacom has worked closely with Whosay for more than two years, executing more than 50 campaigns featuring the likes of Lil Yachty, LeToya Luckett, and Kegan Allen. Sean Moran, Viacom’s head of sales, said that by buying Whosay the entertainment conglomerate can more deeply integrate its social expertise across the sales and marketing organization and augment the work of the Viacom Velocity branded-content group.
“We’re excited about a deeper integration with Whosay and the strength of our combined capabilities,” said Sean Moran, Viacom’s head of marketing and partner solutions. “This partnership will add to our linear, digital and mobile arsenal by bringing us further into the world of social media and shopper marketing. Together, we will offer brand partners unparalleled creative solutions that maximize the power of storytelling, influencer reach, omnichannel distribution and advanced advertising tools to create quality campaigns that drive results.
“From a social standpoint, while we’ve had some excellent work there, it’s really been focused around our tentpoles like the MTV VMAs,” added Moran. “One of the reasons we’re so excited about Whosay is, this instantly puts us into a 52-week capability to deliver social solutions [to advertising clients] with curated scale.”
Using its proprietary Match platform, Whosay pairs brands and influencers, then creates a campaign and spreads it to a targeted audience across social, digital, mobile, linear, out of home and other channels. “Experience” marketing is another arena of interest, as Viacom continues to invest in live events such as the BET Soul Train Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards.
Viacom Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bob Bakish has estimated revenue from non-traditional sources — a bucket that includes everything from advanced advertising to virtual MVPD bundles — at $350 million in 2017 and predicts it could reach $1B by 2020.
Whosay was founded in 2010 by CEO Steve Ellis and CAA, originally as a media company based on an invitation-only social network for celebrities. Today, New York-based Whosay functions as a creative-marketing agency that develops and produces branded content with talent ranging from “micro-influencers” to big-name celebs.
Whosay had raised about $30 million in funding from investors including Comcast Ventures, CAA, Greylock Partners, Amazon.com, High Peaks Ventures, and China’s Tencent. Its range of services include campaign strategy, influencer talent vetting and casting, content production, distribution and performance guarantees. The company also offers in-store and point-of-sale activations for clients.
All told, Whosay has run more than 400 campaigns that have generated over 5 billion impressions and 900 million-plus user engagements, according to the company. It distributes content across multiple platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
Recent Whosay campaigns have featured Vanessa Williams for Aveeno; Darren Criss for AT&T; Tia Mowry (Sister, Sister, Instant Mom) for Oreo; Alec Baldwin for Chevrolet; Brynn Rumfallo (“Dance Moms”) for Pantene; Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things) for Hellmann’s; Christian Navarro (13 Reasons Why) for McDonald’s; and former NFL players DeMarcus Ware and Emmitt Mmith for Dr Pepper and Kingsford.
Whosay’s Ellis said his company doesn’t operate a “network” of influencers. Instead, it creates custom content from scratch — from concept through to enlisting talent and distributing the finished product. “Our mission has been trying to improve the marketing experience on a mobile phone,” he said.
With Whosay, Viacom will be able to create campaigns built around Viacom intellectual property, Moran said, including show talent as well as characters like SpongeBob SquarePants. Whosay will also complement Viacom’s existing advertising assets, including Velocity, an integrated marketing and creative unit, and help Viacom’s new digital studios unit under president Kelly Day — who came on board last fall from AwesomenessTV — in monetizing short-form content, he said.
As part of Viacom, Whosay will remain in its current offices in New York and L.A. operating as an independent organization collaborating with Viacom’s Marketing & Partner Solutions group. Whosay has 72 employees, who will remain with the company under Viacom’s ownership.
Ellis, before starting Whosay, was founder and CEO of Pump Audio, a digital music-rights company acquired in 2007 by Getty Images.
Original sources: Deadline, Variety.
Also, from blog.viacom:
Viacom to Welcome Proven Partner: Influence Marketing Company WHOSAY
Viacom has signed a definitive agreement to acquire WHOSAY, an influence marketing company whose deep reach into next-generation advertising and marketing platforms and solutions will boost Viacom’s capabilities across advertising, marketing and digital content.
Partnering with some of the world’s most recognizable brands, WHOSAY does everything from crafting campaign strategy to casting influencer talent to producing premium content and live events to analyzing data and performance.
An important piece of Viacom’s strategic plan
Viacom’s acquisition of WHOSAY will be an important component of the business strategy laid out by CEO Bob Bakish, who has frequently discussed the necessity of further expanding onto emerging digital platforms and beefing up the company’s already considerable advanced-advertising capabilities.
“One objective is accelerating our participation in next-generation platforms and solutions,” Bakish said, outlining his principle 2018 objectives at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference earlier this month. “So those are things like the over-the-top business, where we see significant opportunity on the virtual MVPD [multichannel video programming distributor] side, also the direct-to-consumer side, and related to that, the advanced advertising side. And this is not something that we’re making up … we had about $350 million of business there across those sectors [in 2017], and we believe that’s a $1 billion business by 2020.”
A proven partner
This acquisition will unite two engaging storytellers, fusing Viacom’s global content engine, diverse audience and best-in-class advanced advertising tools with WHOSAY’s precision ability to seamlessly match brand objectives with talent and creative, and optimize the message through omnichannel distribution.
WHOSAY has already executed more than 50 campaigns for MTV, BET and other Viacom brands over the past two years, crafting activations that feature top influencers such as singer/songwriter LeToya Luckett for November’s BET Soul Train Awards, and rapper Lil Yachty and actor Keegan Allen for the MTV Movie & TV Awards in May.
“We’re excited about a deeper integration with WHOSAY and the strength of our combined capabilities,” said Viacom Head of Marketing & Partner Solutions Sean Moran. “This partnership will add to our linear, digital and mobile arsenal by bringing us further into the world of social media and shopper marketing. Together, we will offer brand partners unparalleled creative solutions that maximize the power of storytelling, influencer reach, omnichannel distribution and advanced advertising tools to create quality campaigns that drive results.”
Complementing Viacom’s strengths
Amplifying the power and reach of WHOSAY’s campaigns is the company’s expertise in matching brands and influencers via its proprietary Match platform. Once the pairing is solidified, WHOSAY is expert at distilling a brand’s goals, creating a campaign, and spreading that message to the ideal audience through social, digital, mobile, linear, experience, out-of-home and other channels.
These advanced whole-campaign capabilities and digital focus will act as a powerful complement to many of Viacom’s existing entities, including the Velocity full-service integrated marketing and creative team and the company’s newly created Digital Studios unit under Kelly Day.
The addition of WHOSAY to Viacom’s portfolio will also underscore Viacom’s position as a leader in advanced advertising, building upon the significant capabilities of its data-driven audience-targeting Vantage product and its status as a founding member of the OpenAP audience targeting and measurement platform.
In addition to their considerable digital and event capabilities, WHOSAY has built a bricks-and-mortar-focused WHOSAY Shopper team, which will open up potential new retail opportunities for Viacom brands.
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Also, from The Hollywood Reporter:
Viacom to Acquire Influencer Platform WhoSay
The company was co-founded by CAA, which also invested alongside Comcast and Greylock Partners.
Viacom has agreed to acquire social platform WhoSay in a move to increase its influencer marketing capabilities.
The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, comes nearly eight years after CAA helped to launch the company alongside founder and CEO Steve Ellis. At the time, WhoSay focused on providing actors, musicians and artists with an easier way to upload photos to social media services such as Twitter and Facebook, while also retaining the rights to the images. Tom Hanks was one of the first big names to join the platform and others, including Jim Carrey and Eva Longoria, soon followed.
Over the years, WhoSay's business has evolved into one focused on influencer marketing. Today, the New York- and Los Angeles-based company works with brands to help them tap into the audience of influencers. WhoSay says that it has worked on over 400 campaigns that have generated over 5 billion impressions and 800 million video views.
Viacom has been working with WhoSay for the last two years on various branded campaigns. Through the deal, the media conglomerate will add WhoSay's sales force, infrastructure and offerings to its linear, digital and mobile advertising capabilities.
WhoSay will continue to operate out of separate offices and work in collaboration with Viacom's marketing and partner solutions group, Viacom Velocity and the new digital studios unit run by Kelly Day.
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Additional source: Mobile Marketing Magazine.
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