iCrossing - not buying any more natural search agencies

I was lucky enough to go to a mini-conference on Mergers and Acquisitions of Digital Agencies this evening which was hosted by Results International.

Results International are the company which helped broker the Spannerworks and iCrossing deal. It was insightful to see how they calculated the worth of a digital agency. I'll have to try and reserve engineer around the amounts rumoured for the Spannerworks deal.

Don Scales from iCrossing was one of the key speakers (alongside Google, Profero and i-Level). He had some interesting comments. He said outright that iCrossing would not be buying another Natural Search company.

One of the key alignments in the Spannerworks deal was that Herzog got on well with Arjo of Spannerworks.

Scales stressed the importance of Analytics. I expect iCrossing will make one or two more acquisitions this year. Probably in Europe. If they're not going to be Natural Search then perhaps in data mining, analytics or perhaps even ad server technology.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Tough to buy new firms when iCrossing laid off a significant part of their product development and operations staff last week and cannot get the funding needed to acquire new firms because of extreme client turnover. Glad Scales spoke this year, would not bet that he speaks (or is with iCrossing) next year.

Ask agency.com how they feel about their formal leader.
Anonymous said…
Interesting to see if iCrossing expands in Europe, having just laid off 10+% of its US employee base.

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