The US-headquartered brand-tech group You & Mr Jones has acquired a majority shareholding in the Inside Ideas Group, the parent company of Oliver the agency that specializes in helping advertisers take core marketing and advertising functions and services in-house.
The terms of the deal have not been disclosed but it is understood that there will be no change to Oliver’s Irish operations which are jointly owned by MD Mark McCann and the UK-headquartered Oliver which was set up by Simon Martin in 2004.
Since then, Oliver has grown substantially and, apart from Dublin and London, it has opened up offices and hubs in New York, Frankfort, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Amsterdam and Hong Kong. It has also worked closely the likes of Unilever in rolling out a number of U-Studios which act as creative and digital hubs within Unilever’s key markets.
Other companies within the Inside Ideas Group include Dare, Adjust Your Set, Oliver Media and Aylesworth Fleming.
You & Mr Jones is headed up by former Havas boss David Jones in 2015 when it raised $350m to invest in companies that are involved in the wider marketing industry and have a compelling technology element underpinning them. Since then it has acquired stakes in a number of leading companies including the likes of Pinterest, Automat, a conversational marketing platform with an AI foundation and Beeswax, a bidder-as-a-service company that enables real-time bidding for programmatic media buys. It has also taken a stake in Amino, a company that provides transparency to brands via blockchain.
