I am excited to share that Sage+Archer, one of the top out-of-home DSPs in Europe, is joining the global Vistar Media organization.
Founded in 2019, Sage+Archer has successfully built an effective media organization, rapidly securing trusted partnerships with buyers such as Dentsu International, Matterkind, Heineken, OMD, Essent and more. They operate across the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, Austria, and Italy. We’ve been partners with Sage+Archer since 2020 and I started having more strategic conversations in the fall of 2021.
As we saw in 2021 and are seeing so far in 2022, the OOH industry and ad tech as a whole is on fire. We are bursting at the seams with opportunities, hustling to staff our teams to handle the load and still have what seems like countless untapped, massive opportunities ahead of us. The time is now to double down on our business and accelerate our growth. The Sage+Archer team are already the leaders in their market, so by bringing them on board we are rapidly increasing the scale and quality of support we can bring to the European marketplace.
The #1 priority for me in exploring M&A opportunities is determining whether the people at a company share the same core values as our team. Similar to Vistar, Sage+Archer raised very little capital and have done the hard work to run a profitable business. This concept and discipline of a sustainable business is still a centerpiece for all lines of business and future growth at Vistar. It goes back to some of the core values of Vistar around providing true value to our customers and the ecosystem.
I’m thrilled that we were able to find a win for both companies in closing this deal. With the backing of Vistar’s resources, Sage+Archer can expand more rapidly and double down on sales, customer service and engineering, with the support of a fully scaled business organization (finance, people ops, legal, marketing, etc.) The S+A team, including the founders, will continue to operate as an independent business unit, driving the strategy of programmatic OOH expansion in EMEA. (By the way, we're also actively hiring in the region!)
This is actually Vistar’s second integration of a technology company, following the acquisition of the content and network management system Cortex in 2015, now a core component of our full-stack SaaS product suite. We’ve seen tremendous success in the development of our SaaS product lines, providing media owners with tools to not just gain programmatic revenue, but actually improve the core operations of their overall network businesses.
We will continue to accelerate our growth through both organic and inorganic opportunities on a global basis. Stay tuned for continued consolidation in our space that will lead to better software and services for both buyers, sellers and partners in the OOH ecosystem.
