American beauty giant Coty has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Beamly, a digital marketing firm based in New York and London. Beamly’s main focus is on driving audience growth and engagement for consumer brands in digital media. While Beamly is active across all digital media including online video, its core capability suite centres around social media.
While Beamly will continue to expand campaigns across non-Coty clients, the acquisition will provide a step change in Coty’s own digital engagement capabilities. Coty and its licensors will utilise Beamly’s suite of social data benchmarking, content creation, content optimisation and consumer engagement tools to deliver the company’s brand strategies.
Beamly will continue to be led by CEO Jason Forbes, and will be supervised by Camillo Pane, executive vice president, category development on behalf of Coty. The Beamly New York team will be based in a dedicated section in Coty’s New York office, while the London team will remain in their current headquarters.
“The acquisition of Beamly will address the accelerating consumer shift in time spent from traditional media to real time digital and social media channels,” said Pane. “Jason and his team have proven capabilities and a proprietary platform that successfully targets and engages millennial consumers. Further, Beamly will help us to accelerate the growth of our e-commerce business, and be a positive contributor as Coty advances toward becoming a highly focused, pure-play leader and challenger in Beauty.”
“We have seen our platform disrupt vertical CPC/CPV benchmarks by nine times,” added Forbes. “With Coty, we will enjoy the scale to accelerate product innovation, expanding across clients in a ‘mobile first’ marketplace.”
