Common Interest Group of Agencies is in the process of acquisition

Harsh? Maybe, but for every Barbie, there are countless blunders that are completely out of step with the zeitgeist. Bud Light, PepsiCo, Balenciaga, Burger King, Peloton—even these respected brands with savvy marketers have had their share of insensitive attempts to reflect culture in recent years.

Suddenly the Common Interest proposition starts to make sense.

Of course, every agency strives for this. Group leaders want to differentiate themselves in execution. Founder Anthony Freedman, a former Havas regional chairman, knows that CMOs want to manage culturally relevant brands but struggle to sell them in the boardroom. As a result, marketing often gets sucked into a performance-driven race to the bottom. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“One of the key goals we’re trying to accomplish with Common Interest is to provide CMOs with the business case they need to develop, support and then measure a strategy based on building cultural relevance,” Freedman said.

To achieve this, they are focused on building a network of companies that provide CMOs with the knowledge to understand culture and the tools to create content that will be monetized through their own media, rather than relying solely on paid reach.

So far, there are three companies: TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, a brand consulting and management expert firm acquired last year; Otherway, a creative studio acquired in April; and CultureLab, a cultural analytics platform launched in the spring.

This list may expand to include a few more items by the end of the year.

There’s already one on the horizon, and Common Interest plans to launch another creative firm this year. There could be three more deals in the next year or so.

“At this point we could have seven or eight companies in the group with a couple hundred people in the UK and the US,” Freedman said. “There are a couple of deals we’re working on now.”

He’s unsurprisingly coy about specifics, not just out of caution but because it’s hard to pinpoint what kind of business he wants for Common Interest. These aren’t your typical targets for marketing services groups. Think beyond the usual suspects—those in brands, entertainment, technology, and modern media. Talks have already taken place with several such companies.

“We’re not trying to build another marketing services holding company,” Freedman said. “Instead, it’s about building something that works where brand meets entertainment, technology and modern media. To do that, we want companies that enable us to operate in those spaces, including those that are founded in entertainment but can also be used by brands.”

In this final section, he looks at companies in one of the more interesting and potentially lucrative trends in media today: branded entertainment. Slowly but surely, major advertisers are becoming entertainment financiers, getting their brands in front of people outside the typical commercial break—whether it’s between TV shows or social media posts.

“We think we’ll probably have an entertainment division because part of our strategy is to develop intellectual property and our own entertainment formats,” Freedman said.

In this way, Common Interest gains greater credibility in convincing marketing executives that they can create their own entertainment.

The group believes there are two companies that could help with this: one is a startup they want to invest in, and the other is a company they want to acquire — both are in the advertising and entertainment industries, but Freedman declined to name them.

“These companies will be built around people with ideas and ambition to create original content that exists to entertain,” Freedman said. “We have a strong network to help both realize that ambition and find an audience for those ideas. We also build a lot more credibility to help brands that are active in popular culture when we are also part of the entertainment industry.”

Overall, the group’s credibility seems to be fine. In fact, talks are already underway with some clients about working with its companies as part of the group, rather than separately.

It’s evidence of how far the Common Interest initiative has come since it was launched in September last year.

“It’s important to recognize that cultural relevance goes beyond entertainment or a big star in an ad,” said former Diageo head of culture and entertainment Leila Fataar, who now runs her own agency, Platform13. “We live in a world of radical transformation. With consumer attention at its peak, a fragmented media landscape (digital and virtual), new commerce models driven by intuitive Web3 behaviors, and AI becoming mainstream, the traditional funnel is no longer fit for purpose.”

Common Interest is clearly positioned to counter marketing’s obsession with quantification. But the group’s principals don’t dismiss these ideas entirely. They know that paid performance, for example, is important to amplify certain ideas for greater reach, but they don’t go by those metrics. Not when so much of it is controlled and increasingly commoditized by the tech platforms themselves these days. It’s up to marketers to come up with strong ideas that can exist despite all that.

“We are a solutions company, not an implementation company,” Freedman said.

This won’t be for every marketer, and he knows it. In many ways, it’s a niche game.

“Our strategy is not to try to convince CMOs who aren’t willing to think about things that way to spend their Common Interest budget,” Freedman said. “We’re here to create a new and different option for CMOs who have already concluded that cultural relevance is a competitive advantage.”

It’s really about those marketers who have reached a point in their career where they recognize the importance of building a strong brand. For many, the pandemic was a moment of clarity. Brand advertising was the key that allowed companies to survive the inflationary period of the last two years. CEOs have repeatedly mentioned on conference calls how the strength of their brands allowed them to pass on the costs of inflation to consumers. Not paid advertising. Not programmatic. The power of the brand.

“It’s hard work,” said Fataar, who wrote the book “Culture Led Brands” on the subject. “When done well, it’s emotional, it makes people feel something, driving reach and relevance, buzz and depth, drawing people to your brand rather than pushing them against it.”