Publicis acquisition signals that creator M&A is not slowing down in 2025

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Pending regulatory approval, the Publicis deal is expected to close in late March 2025. While financial terms were not made available, this acquisition would build on a growing influencer division for Publicis, which also acquired influencer company Influential last year.

As the holding companies continue trying to compete and grow influencer operations, many have bought smaller influencer agencies, developed their own offerings (often powered by third-party platforms) or acquired established creator and influencer platforms. Typically, those holding companies end up “presenting it as [their] own,” as Sanja Partalo, cofounder and managing partner at venture capital firm S4S Ventures, previously told Digiday.

So far, holding companies have gone the route of acquiring service-based agencies to increase their creator offerings as influencer marketing has become more widespread and complex as a business, explained Minda Smiley, senior analyst at eMarketer. This forces agencies to constantly adapt, rather than treat influencer marketing as an “add on,” Smiley added. In 2025, the global influencer marketing market is expected to reach some $33 billion, more than tripling in size since 2020, per Statista, making it an attractive bet for holding companies.

“Agencies that can provide a more holistic, creative approach may have an advantage,” she said, noting that the maturing creator economy has seen creators move into streaming, launching newsletters and podcasts as well as creating syndicated and episodic content.

Next month, Publicis is acquiring BR Media Group, which consists of its companies Space, a creative studio for brands and creators, Mis, a creator recruitment and management platform and Farol, a creator agency that offers content creation to business intelligence. With this deal, Celso Ribeiro, co-founder and chief executive of BR Media, will stay on as chief executive of the company. Publicis and BR Media Group did not make executives available for this story.

It remains to be seen how Publicis plans to run its creator operations alongside Influential, which has its own network of some 3.5 million creators (which touts that 90% of its global influencers have more than 1 million followers). From the data perspective, the holdco said in a release that it will integrate BR Media’s technology, with access to more than 5 billion data points from 50 sources, to boost data management and marketing platform Epsilon’s identity-based marketing — ultimately streamlining audience targeting and manage influencer campaigns more efficiently for clients.

“[Publicis is] very keen on integrating their own data capabilities and their own technology,” Smiley said. “With this new agency, integrations will be top of mind — it’ll be interesting to see if and how they really expect them to collaborate and where there might be potential conflicts of interest or overlap that could lead to some consolidation internally.”

For its part, Publicis would benefit from rapidly expanding its creator agency offering with this acquisition because it’s simply faster “to buy than to build” and gain a “geographical foothold” in this market, said Jamie Gutfreund, founder of creator-focused consultancy Creator Vision. 

Brazil is growing quickly in the influencer market — with 15.8% of the global share of Instagram influencers located in the country, per Influencer Marketing Hub. There are also around half a million social media influencers in Brazil — which exceeds the number of engineers and dentists in the country, according to Fortune Business Insights. In LATAM and the Caribbean, digital influencer advertising spending was expected to surpass $1.12 billion last year, up 12.6% from the previous year, according to Statista.

Overall, Latin America has been a steadily growing market for the company, where it saw 30.3% growth last year, according to Publicis’ release. Publicis also acquired other businesses in the region — adtech platform Retargetly in 2022 and tech company Practia in 2023 — as it aims to bolster data capabilities in those markets.

Holdcos also have a vested interest to expand their creator divisions to attract those client investments, or risk giving up those ad dollars to independent influencer agencies. Influencer agencies in recent years have been muscling their way into more agency territory as more brands try to experiment with influencer programs across AI, CTV, content production and talent management.

Overall, within the creator marketplace, the “murky middle” mid-sized influencer agencies, as Smiley put it, is an area to watch as “[they] might end up being folded into some of these bigger agencies,” Smiley said. “They might pivot their business models, and maybe go into more like a talent management route, or some other route that they feel like is growing within the sector right now.”

Those in the middle may eventually get swept up by a larger company or become pressured to pivot into other creator services, like sports-focused, B2B marketing or another niche creator area that could still attract brands, according to analysts.

Gutfreund could also see a customer relationship management (CRM) giant making a play in the creator ecosystem. There is more opportunity for creator marketing to develop personalized content delivery at scale, which is similar to what CRM players are doing when they achieve “[this] holy grail of marketing,” Gutfreund said.