UK-based communications group WPP’s chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell wrote tantalisingly of his group’s two biggest corporate venturing exits in the Sunday Telegraph in March, that the sale of Buddy Media, a social marketing company, for $745m to US-based cloud company Salesforce – our exit of the year – as well as the sale of Omniture for $1.8bn to Adobe in 2011, had been “unfortunate”.
Sorrell explained: “We have to add and explore new capabilities and talents, really acting as a strategic venture capitalist or private equity firm, taking control of, or investing in, new firms that broaden and deepen our client offer and educate and train our people in new ways.
“Recent stellar examples were Omniture in the area of web analytics and Buddy Media with its Facebook platform. With both we had not only strategic investments, but also training relationships for our people. Unfortunately, both were so good that they were taken out prematurely by Adobe and Salesforce.”
Despite the misfortune of WPP receiving a $60m cheque for its investment in Buddy Media, we decided the company was a worthy exit of the year.
The company was one of the early groups to recognise social network Facebook would be important in the marketing world, and was set up in 2007 to help companies market more effectively through that medium.
After the sale, Michael Lazerow, chief executive of Buddy Media, told news provider Inc what it had been like marketing the company in the early days. “Facebook, Facebook, Facebook – it’s the way of the future and old media is TV, and the printing stuff on dead trees, and driving in these gas-powered vehicles, that’s dead. And Facebook is the new way.
“Instead of all of these pages, we have this people-based world and it’s all about conversations and streams. And we get blank stares. I mean, people would be like, ‘What are you talking about? I can’t understand you. I can’t follow you.’ ”
He said it took the company until early 2008 to get its first client.
Not only has the financial return been WPP’s best so far, but Buddy Media also appears to have received significant help from WPP. Mark Read, chief executive of WPP Digital, the online unit of WPP, said: “We took Buddy Media into a meeting with Facebook as our partner.”
Lazerow said of Read: “Mark straddles the worlds of big advertising media, creativity and the creative agencies, and he is someone who understands all sides of the table. He helped us as a young company realise our dream. He can see things through young companies’ eyes and large agency networks.
Business is not a zero-sum game. Everyone has to win to get value out of a partnership. With Mark, it was not just how can we benefit from the great relationship with Buddy Media, but how can we help Buddy Media?”
WPP backed Buddy Media in 2010, with a $5m investment. Another corporate venturing winner from the deal was Japan conglomerate Softbank Corporation, which led the company’s $6.5m B round in 2008.
Lazerow himself made the news because he candidly discussed his heart problems in a video using a tablet and text, instead of speech, celebrating the sale and saying how lucky he felt to be alive, having come close to death twice, at the ages of 18 months and 19 years, due to a heart defect, since treated with a valve replacement. Lazerow also tackled this subject at a speech at the SXSW conference, where he gave a talk on “how cheating death helped me live without fear”.
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