REG - S4 Capital PLC - Miyagi to merge with Media.Monks

S4 CapitalAnnouncement

15/11/2021 07:05

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RNS Number : 3108S  S4 Capital PLC  15 November 2021

15th November 2021

 

S4 Capital plc

("S(4)Capital" or "the Company")

 

Miyagi to merge with Media.Monks

 

Media.Monks strengthens its content capabilities, adds talent and expands in
Italy

 

S(4)Capital plc (SFOR.L), the tech-led, new age/new era digital advertising
and marketing services company, announces that Miyagi, leading creative
content marketing agency - integrating strategy, creativity and production -
is merging with Media.Monks to form S(4)Capital's Content practice in Italy.
The merger adds to the existing Content, Data&Digital Media capabilities
in Italy, Europe's fourth largest advertising market.

 

Miyagi was founded in 2013 by five partners Francesco Bragonzi
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesco-bragonzi-24329935/?originalSubdomain=it)
, Francesco Menichini
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesco-menichini-445b626/) , Tommaso Marucchi
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommaso-marucchi-b3a3b03a/) ,  Felice Arborea
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/felice-arborea-7077b312/) and Giuseppe Azzone
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/giuseppeazzone/) . Specialising in end-to-end
digital experience content strategy, design and production, Miyagi now numbers
70 experts in Milan working on clients such as Campari Group, Danone,
Luxottica, Red Bull and Xiaomi.

 

S(4)Capital Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell said, "We are delighted to
welcome Francesco, Tommaso, Felice, Giuseppe and Francesco to Media.Monks and
S(4)Capital. We look forward to developing an even stronger Content, practice
in Italy to complement our Data&Digital Media practice and form a base for
Technology services, building on the impressive success Miyagi has already had
and broadening our base in Western Continental Europe."

 

"Miyagi significantly expands our Content practice in Italy giving us deeper
creative, production and social capabilities which we can put to work
immediately for our Italian clients. Besides that, Miyagi's work and
management team looks a lot like Media.Monks a few years back, and we got
along since the first moment we met. With close to 100 Monks in the Italian
market, and a clear focus on digital creative craft I believe we will
accomplish great things together,'' said Victor Knaap, CEO Media.Monks EMEA,
and S(4)Capital Executive Director.

 

Francesco Bragonzi, Chairman and Co-Founder of Miyagi added "On behalf of the
partners we are excited to be joining Media.Monks and we look forward to
taking their disruptive model to the next level here in Italy. Becoming part
of a company that shares the same vision that we've followed since the
beginning was a unique and unmissable opportunity for us and we can't wait to
start this incredible new adventure and to share this new path with our
clients. We also can't forget who made this possible and we really want to
share the excitement of this moment with our employees who have made this
possible and who will be first in line on this new ride."

 

Enquiries

 

 S(4)Capital plc                              Tel: +44 (0)20 3793 0003
 Sir Martin Sorrell, Executive Chairman
 Powerscourt (PR adviser to S(4)Capital plc)  Tel: +44 (0)7970 246 725
 Elly Williamson
 Jane Glover

 

 

About Miyagi

 

Miyagi is a creative content marketing agency that integrates strategy,
creativity and production into a smooth and productive process.

 

It was born as a production company and its evolution reflected what the
market has been looking for in recent years: one agency to cover the whole
stream of creative communication, starting from the building up process of
strategy, research and data driven plans, through the creativity and ideation
of multi-channel campaigns to the actual production of videos, events and on
field campaigns and ending with the post production and multi format and
multi-language adaptation for all the contents.

 

It now has more than 70 employees distributed across different teams
(strategy, social, account, production and post production) with different
backgrounds and skills who cooperate together, sharing the same spaces and
ideas.

 

It was included in the 2020 list of the fastest growing companies both in the
100 Leaders of Growth List - for the "Il Sole 24 Ore" and the 1000 Europe's
Fastest Growing Companies 2020 list for the Financial Times.

 

In 2020 it also won the Grand Prix and six further awards at the NC digital
Awards in Italy.

 

Miyagi has now become a market model that can still count on its original
production DNA and has also added the strategic and creativity approach so
needed in the new digital environment. From the beginning of 2021, it has also
opened a new original production company brand with TOGA, in order to
specialise and extend further into the filming production stream.

 

 

About Media.Monks

 

Media.Monks is a global creative production company that partners with clients
across industries and markets to craft amazing work for leading businesses and
brands. Its integrated production capabilities span the entire creative
spectrum, covering anything you could possibly want from a production partner,
and probably more.

 

From creative campaigns and content to bespoke development and design,
Media.Monks works above the line and below the fold at the intersection of
creativity and technology. Operating across teams, time zones, and
technologies with an incredible in-house team of more than 3,350 Monks,
including recent S(4)Capital mergers. Its work is recognized by advertising
and craft awards around the world, producing 131 Cannes Lions and 240+ FWAs to
date.

 

Founded in 2001 and rooted in digital, you can find MediaMonks anywhere on the
Web as well as in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mountain View, Sandpoint,
Toronto, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Dublin, London,
Amsterdam, Hilversum, Cape Town, Stockholm, Kiev, Dnepr, Moscow, Nur-Sultan,
Dubai, Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Singapore, Shanghai, Sydney, Melbourne, and
Auckland.

 

About S(4)Capital

 

S(4)Capital plc (SFOR.L) is the tech-led, new age/new era digital advertising
and marketing services company, established by Sir Martin Sorrell in May 2018.

Its strategy is to build a purely digital advertising and marketing services
business for global, multinational, regional, local clients and
millennial-driven influencer brands. This will be achieved initially by
integrating leading businesses in two practice areas: content and
data&digital media, along with an emphasis on "faster, better, cheaper"
executions in an always-on consumer-led environment, with a unitary structure.

Digital is by far the fastest-growing segment of the advertising market.
S(4)Capital estimates that in 2020 digital accounted for over 50% (for the
first time) or $290 billion of total global advertising spend of $525 billion
(excluding over $500 billion of trade promotion marketing, the primary target
of the Amazon advertising platform) and projects that by 2022 total global
advertising spend will expand to $650 billion and digital's share will grow to
approximately 60% and by 2024 to approximately 70%, accelerated by the impact
of covid-19.

S(4)Capital combined with MediaMonks, the leading AdAge A-listed creative
digital content production company led by Victor Knaap and Wesley ter Haar, in
July 2018 and with MightyHive, the market-leading digital media solutions
provider for future thinking marketers and agencies, led by Peter Kim and
Christopher S. Martin, in December 2018.

In April 2019, MightyHive combined with ProgMedia to expand operations into
Latin America and MediaMonks acquired film studio Caramel Pictures to expand
content studio capabilities. In June 2019, MediaMonks announced a planned
combination with Australia-based BizTech, a leading marketing transformation
and customer experience company. In August 2019, MediaMonks combined with
Amsterdam-based digital influencer marketing agency IMA. In October 2019,
MediaMonks combined with Firewood Marketing, the largest digital marketing
agency based in Silicon Valley, that was recently ranked, along with
MediaMonks and Circus (see below), as one of the fastest growing agencies by
Adweek, and MightyHive combined with award-winning UK-based digital analytics,
biddable media and data science company ConversionWorks and South Korea-based
data and analytics consultancy MightyHive Korea. In November 2019, MediaMonks
announced its combination with Delhi-based content creation and production
company WhiteBalance (completed in August 2020 - the delay due to necessary
merger clearance procedures) and then with fully integrated digital agency
Circus Marketing in January 2020 (completed in March 2020).

In May 2020, MightyHive announced a combination with Digodat, one of the
leading Latin American data and analytics consultancies, and in June 2020,
MightyHive announced its combination with Lens10, a leading Australian digital
strategy and analytics consultancy. In July 2020, MightyHive announced a
combination with Orca Pacific, a market leading full-service Amazon agency and
boutique consultancy firm based in Seattle. In August 2020, MightyHive
announced a combination with London-based Brightblue, an econometric and media
optimisation consultancy. In September 2020, MediaMonks announced its
combination with Dare.Win, expanding its geographical presence to France.

In January 2021, MediaMonks announced its combination with integrated
creative, technology and media agency Decoded Advertising, Shanghai based
creative agency TOMORROW and Stuttgart based automotive specialist STAUD
STUDIOS. MightyHive also announced its combination with integrated digital
performance marketing agency Metric Theory. In February 2021, MightyHive
acquired the assets of Datalicious Australia, a leading Google Marketing
Platform, Google Cloud and Google Analytics partner in Asia Pacific. In March
2021, MediaMonks announced it had entered into a conditional agreement in
relation to a combination of MediaMonks with Toronto-based design and
experience agency, Jam3. In May 2021, MightyHive announced it had entered into
a conditional agreement in relation to a combination of MightyHive with the
leading digital performance agency in Brazil, Raccoon Group.

On 26 July 2021, MightyHive announced a combination with Salesforce specialist
Destined expanding its data and digital media practice in Asia Pacific. On 8
September 2021, the new unitary brand Media.Monks announced a combination with
the iconic culture and creative marketing agency Cashmere, based in Los
Angeles. Also in September 2021, Media.Monks announced a merger with leading
digital transformation services firm Zemoga, headquartered in Los Angeles,
with further US offices as well as delivery centres in Colombia. The merger
expanded the Media.Monks offering into technology services.

In August 2021, S(4)Capital launched its unitary brand by merging MediaMonks
and MightyHive into Media.Monks, represented by a dynamic logo mark that
features MightyHive's iconic hexagon. As the operational brand, Media.Monks
underpins S(4)Capital's agility, digital knowledge and efficiency and is the
next step in delivering on its foundational promise to unify content,
data&digital media and technology services.

On 16 July 2020, S(4)Capital announced the successful placing of 36,766,642
new ordinary shares at a price of 315p raising approximately £116 million
gross proceeds which has been used for further expansion and combination
purposes.

On 19 July 2021, S(4)Capital announced it had engaged Credit Suisse AG, London
branch, HSBC Bank plc and Barclays Bank plc as lead arrangers for a seven-year
€375 million senior secured term loan. In addition, it negotiated a
five-year £100 million equivalent multicurrency senior secured revolving
credit facility with Credit Suisse, HSBC, Barclays, JP Morgan and BNP Paribas.
Both term loan and revolving facility were successfully completed in early
August 2021. This refinanced its existing €25 million and US$28.9 million
term loans and its €35 million and €43.5 million multicurrency revolving
credit facilities and will provide approximately £200 million for general
corporate purposes, including funding the cash element of future mergers,
which is typically one-half of overall consideration. The Company will
maintain its policy of maximum net leverage not exceeding 1.5-2x Operational
EBITDA.

Victor Knaap, Wesley ter Haar, Pete Kim, Christopher Martin, Peter Rademaker
and Scott Spirit all joined the S(4)Capital Board as Directors. The
S(4)Capital Board also includes Rupert Faure Walker, Paul Roy, Daniel Pinto,
Sue Prevezer, Elizabeth Buchanan, Naoko Okumoto, Margaret Ma Connolly and
Miles Young.

The Company now has over 6,900 people in 33 countries across the Americas,
Europe, the Middle East and Africa and Asia-Pacific and a current market
capitalisation of approximately £3.8 billion (c.$5.1 billion) and would rank
well inside the FTSE 125. It achieved Unicorn status in a little over one
year, unique in the advertising and marketing services industry. Sir Martin
was CEO of WPP for 33 years, building it from a £1 million "shell" company in
1985 into the world's largest advertising and marketing services company with
a market capitalisation of over £16 billion on the day he left. Today its
market capitalisation is £13 billion, having recently been surpassed by
Publicis for the first time. Prior to that Sir Martin was Group Financial
Director of Saatchi & Saatchi Company Plc for nine years.

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