Ad-tech, real-time insight, and management decision support for programmatic, search, social, and demand generation.

Established in 1996 and headquartered in San Francisco with more than 150 employees across nine offices around the world, DWA is a global Business-to-Business digital media and marketing agency. DWA applies expertise in ad-tech, real-time insight, and management decision support to a range of integrated, global media including: programmatic, search, social, and demand generation. Its approach has delivered success for a diverse group of enterprise clients, including Sprint, NetApp, Cisco, DXC, Salesforce, Oracle, and Informatica.

The combination of DWA and Merkle will further boost Merkle’s Business-to-Business capability, adding scale and breadth to existing capabilities and offering brands in the technology and Business-to-Business sectors greater sophistication, integrated technology, data, creativity, and outstanding performance marketing.

David Wood, Chairman and Founder of DWA commented: “With Merkle we have found a valuable partner that will allow us to further augment our capabilities, while also adding scale and breadth to Merkle’s Business-to-Business technology practice. GP Bullhound was a great advisory partner, showing strong commitment and deep sector expertise throughout the process, and was invaluable in delivering this transaction for us.”

Simon Nicholls, Partner at GP Bullhound said: “We are delighted to have advised DWA on this sale to Merkle. We see significant opportunities for Business-to-Business specialists like DWA.” Chris Graves, Director at GP Bullhound added: “We believe there is a great fit between the businesses and that being a part of Merkle will accelerate DWA’s growth still further.”

This represents GP Bullhound’s 11th transaction in the Digital Services sector in the last 18 months alone and further underlines the firm’s expertise in advising category leaders in the sector. Selected previous transactions include Media iQ (investment from ECI Partners), Aquila (sold to Merkle), In2Media (sold to KMD), Gleam (investment from Dentsu), The Cocktail (sold to Wunderman), Sequence (sold to Salesforce), Karmarama (sold to Accenture), Potato (sold to AKQA), The Bio Agency (sold to Tech Mahindra), Essence (sold to WPP), Designit (sold to Wipro) and Fjord (sold to Accenture), among many others.

Enquiries
For enquiries please contact: Simon Nicholls, Partner, at simon.nicholls@gpbullhound.com, Chris Graves, Director, at chris.graves@gpbullhound.com or Marvin Maerz, Associate, at marvin.maerz@gpbullhound.com

About GP Bullhound
GP Bullhound is a leading technology advisory and investment firm, providing transaction advice and capital to the best entrepreneurs and founders in Europe and beyond. Founded in 1999, the firm today has offices in London, San Francisco, Stockholm, Berlin, Manchester, Paris, Hong Kong and Madrid. For more information, please visit www.gpbullhound.com, or follow on Twitter @GPBullhound