News

Infinite Global Sets the Stage for Its Next Era of Innovation and Impact with Investment Partner

PALAZZO served as exclusive financial advisor to Infinite Global Consulting, a leading international communications and reputation management firm, in securing an investment from ParkSouth Ventures, a Charlotte-based private investment firm. The investment will establish Infinite as a strategic communications platform and fuel the firm’s continued growth and expansion.

Since 2001, Infinite has supported the communications and reputation management needs of many of the world’s largest and most successful professional services firms. Led by a team of seasoned professionals across its New York City (headquarters), San Francisco, and London offices, Infinite works closely with its clients to provide strategic communications strategy, public and media relations, crisis and litigation communications, and thought leadership and content development.

The executive leadership team that includes Founder & CEO Jamie Diaferia, President Zach Olsen, and Chief Operating Officer Isabel Podda will continue to lead the Company in this next phase of growth.

"We have been singularly focused on building an agency that attracts and retains the best clients and talent in the industry, and that mission requires vigilance to keep pace with their needs. We decided several years ago that to further fulfill our potential we would need the right investment partner. In ParkSouth, we found an aligned partner that can add strategic value, as well as investment capital," said Jamie Diaferia.

ParkSouth was founded and is led by Steven Ruoff and Richard Veal. The thesis-driven investment firm focuses on talent-centric businesses in the marketing and tech-enabled services categories.

“This investment reflects our focused effort to back a strategic communications firm that delivers the senior-level counsel organizations need to navigate complexity, reputational risk, and a constantly evolving media landscape,” said Steven Ruoff and Richard Veal, partners at ParkSouth Ventures. “The team, led by Jamie, Zach, and Issy, has built a truly exceptional business, and we're looking forward to supporting their continued growth.”

ParkSouth has partnered with Michael Koziol, an experienced agency operator who will advise the company on operations, growth strategy, M&A, and integration.

“Jamie and the team at Infinite have built an incredibly special and valuable company that combines world-class strategic communications capabilities and a world-class company culture,” said Michael Koziol. “I am excited about the partnership and opportunity to support them in the realization of their ambition and potential.”

Adweek's 2024 Breakthrough Media Agency brings proven cross-channel expertise and West Coast presence to Brainlabs

PALAZZO served as exclusive financial advisor to Exverus Media, a highly decorated Los Angeles-based media agency recognized as Adweek's 2024 Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year, in its strategic acquisition by Brainlabs, an independent, full-service, media agency. The move significantly enhances Brainlabs’ full-funnel media capabilities in the U.S. which, combined with its existing team and products, will allow it to operate as a single agency of record for all media channels. It also marks Brainlabs' expansion into the West Coast market complementing its existing strong East Coast and Midwest presence.

Exverus Media, which manages $100M+ annual media spend, has earned industry-wide recognition for pioneering data-driven media planning across traditional, programmatic advertising, retail media, e-commerce, paid search, paid social and analytics, with a client roster including Premier Protein, Dymatize and The Chosen. The acquisition adds deep expertise in full-funnel media planning to Brainlabs, along with creative strategy, and execution for ambitious brands.

“Exverus has built its reputation on transforming how brands approach media,” said Bill Durrant, Co-founder of Exverus Media. “The real magic happens when you can seamlessly orchestrate across media channels—TV, retail media, programmatic, and social—while measuring impact in real time. We chose to join Brainlabs because they’re a like-minded, founder-led, independent agency with a sharp focus on results. Their strong U.S. presence and global capabilities will give our clients access to new products, technology, and scale, while retaining the innovative spirit that drives our approach to cross-channel measurement. This is an exciting moment for our clients, who will continue to work with the same Exverus team, now backed by the scale and expertise of a larger independent agency. I’m excited to continue in my role, alongside the rest of the Exverus team, as part of Brainlabs.”

"What excites me most about this partnership is how it amplifies everything we've built at Exverus," said Talia Arnold, Managing Director at Exverus Media. "Our clients will continue to work with the same passionate team they know and trust, but now with access to capabilities that will take their media performance to the next level. This partnership represents the evolution of what modern media agencies can achieve when data, technology, and human insight work in perfect harmony."

"The future of media isn't about choosing between digital or traditional channels - it's about mastering both to create real results," said Daniel Gilbert, Founder and CEO of Brainlabs. “We're creating what I believe will be the new gold standard for independent modern media agencies, serving clients as their single agency of record across all media platforms with a focus on driving growth and results. Exverus has proven that their data-driven approach to cross-channel integration delivers exceptional outcomes for brands”.

Alliance brings together CTC’s creative and data-driven marketing engine with Acacia’s investment capital and deep expertise in scaling digital-first businesses

PALAZZO served as exclusive financial advisor to Common Thread Collective, a top growth agency for direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands, in securing an investment from The Acacia Group, investors in transformative technology and services companies. This alliance brings together CTC’s creative and data-driven marketing engine with Acacia’s investment capital and deep expertise in scaling digital-first businesses. CTC, founded in 2012 by CEO Taylor Holiday in Costa Mesa, California, has built a distinctive reputation for helping e-commerce brands to grow profitably. The company combines proprietary data tools, financial planning, creative strategy, and performance marketing to empower e-commerce brands generating $10 million to $100 million in revenue to scale their bottom line profit.

“In a time when every marketing dollar needs to work harder, CTC has built a smart, disciplined model for tying marketing to measurable financial results,” said Frederic Cassis, managing partner at The Acacia Group. “We believe CTC has all the ingredients for rapid expansion—a brilliant leadership team, proprietary tools, and an unwavering focus on customer success. With our support, they’ll accelerate growth through product innovation, talent development, and targeted acquisitions, keeping customer impact front and center.”

“This is a defining moment for our team and our clients,” said Taylor Holiday, founder and CEO of CTC. “Acacia shares our mission to build CTC as the go-to agency for profit-oriented consumer brands and a place where top talent wants to work. Their investment and expertise give us new opportunities to scale, evolve our proprietary tech, deliver stronger results for our clients, and create new growth for our people. This partnership unlocks the next era of CTC.”

CTC is renowned for bridging the gap between marketing and finance, empowering brand leaders with the necessary tools, strategy, and execution to drive more profit. With marketing teams expected to own the full customer journey, back every decision with data, master creative storytelling, and move with speed and agility, the demands have never been higher. The agency's systemized approach to data analysis, financial planning, growth strategy, and performance marketing is helping many of the top direct-to-consumer brands thrive in today's demanding environment with clarity and profitability at scale.

PALAZZO served as the exclusive financial advisor to Lockard & Wechsler Direct (LWD), a performance video agency on its sale to McKinney, a full-service marketing agency and part of the publicly-traded communications network, Cheil Worldwide. Founded in 1991, LWD has a decades-long reputation as a leader in performance video tactics, blending science, art, and culture to drive ROI for video marketing across the linear and connected TV (CTV) landscapes. LWD’s acquisition will allow McKinney to extend its competencies in the fast-growing CTV and video space, increasing client’s reach and ability to meet end-customers across all stages of the media mix, from digital and social to linear and CTV content, all supported by best-in-class direct and programmatic execution.

Full-service content studio delivers high-impact, social-first content across the customer journey, strengthening New Engen’s creative foundation

PALAZZO served as the exclusive financial advisor to Donut Digital, a creative-led performance marketing agency based in Manhattan Beach, California, on its sale to New Engen, a leading digital marketing agency.

Founded in 2021, Donut Digital has established a reputation as one of the most innovative and fastest growing performance agencies through a highly differentiated creative-centric approach and efficient in-house production capabilities. Donut Digital’s acquisition will allow New Engen to create a full-service content studio, meeting client needs across all stages of the customer journey, from short form video and user generated content, to premium CTV/OTT content.  

“We’re beyond thrilled to bring Donut Digital’s capabilities to New Engen as creative has always been one of the most important levers to drive brand growth,” said New Engen founder and CEO, Justin Hayashi. “Donut Digital’s unique ability to produce native, social-first content at high capacity for clients across numerous verticals will support New Engen in expanding our creative foundation. Together, we share a vision and are positioned to unlock even greater opportunities for our clients.”   

Co-founders of Donut Digital, Alice Woo, Ari Jessel, and Brian Kim, who led Honey’s marketing before its $4B acquisition by PayPal, started their agency to address the challenges they faced as brand leaders. Their path mirrors that of New Engen CEO Justin Hayashi, who helped e-commerce company Zulily reach $1B in revenue before founding his own agency.   

Donut Digital’s Alice Woo said, “We’re excited to join forces with New Engen. Our teams share a commitment to innovation and a deep understanding of what brands need today to succeed across digital platforms. This partnership allows us to continue delivering for our clients while expanding our capabilities with the media expertise and measurement talent that New Engen brings to the table.”   

Following recent acquisitions of Acorn Influence and LT Partners, the addition of Donut Digital to New Engen’s portfolio is another step in the company’s vision of building a premier digital marketing agency.  

Full-service media agency group will play a key role in expanding the capabilities offered by fast-growing MTP

PALAZZO served as exclusive financial advisor to True Independent Holdings, parent company of True Media, True Media Canada, Coegi, and RADaR, on its sale to Meet The People, the innovative alternative to the big advertising holding company model and a portfolio company of Innovatus Capital Partners. With more than 200 employees and offices in both the US and Canada, along with capabilities that include media planning and buying, a programmatic trading desk, and a data and analytics unit, TIH represents a significant addition to the growing MTP roster. With the completion of the deal, the agency and its subsidiaries will join VSA Partners, Public Label, Match Retail, Saltwater Collective and Swell Media as a full partner in the MTP agency group.

“Joining forces with TIH and its agencies is an important step in the evolution of Meet The People,” says MTP Founder and Group CEO, Tim Ringel. “It adds substantial scale, skill and technology access to our media offering representing our ambition of excellence for our clients, which will help all of our agency brands better serve our clients.”

Founded in 2005, True Media quickly built a reputation for strong strategically-based planning and aggressive client advocacy in media negotiations. Their forward thinking also helped them to stay ahead of the curve in performance media, leading to their launch of Coegi, a digital media and programmatic advertising agency, and RADaR, an ad performance data and analytics firm.

Now, as part of MTP, the TIH family of companies will anchor a robust offering of media services to MTP agencies while continuing to work with other independent agencies and clients across North America. MTP’s existing media agency Swell Media, will maintain their specialty in ecommerce and B2B under this new structure.

Founder and CEO of True Independent Holdings, Jack Miller, says, “This is an exciting time for all of us. Tim and the entire team at MTP have crafted an agency group that is both grounded in valuing the individual and focused on innovating the industry through independent agencies. It’s an approach that perfectly aligns with the ways we’ve always conducted business, and I’m eager to see what this new relationship will enable us to achieve.”

Under MTP’s innovative new organizational approach, all of the roster agencies can work closely together as a community in a single ownership structure, while retaining independence as a core strength to establish their own identity and culture. By combining entrepreneurially minded firms into one fully integrated platform, MTP is able to bring specialized services to clients, while providing fully integrated agency-of-record solutions to these brands at the same time.

“It’s an operating model that exceeds the expectations of clients in every way,” says Ringel. “It allows us to offer integrated thinking, better services, faster solutions, less friction and deep expertise, all in a collaborative and transparent manner. These are the things that make a real difference in the relationships between brands and their agencies.”

With the addition of TIH’s 200 plus employees, the combined operations will boast headcount of over 750 employees in both the U.S. and Canada. It continues MTP’s steep growth trajectory over the past few years, achieved with strategic and financial support from Innovatus Capital Partners LLC, the New York-based portfolio management firm.

“We’re thrilled to have TIH join the Meet The People agency group,” says Innovatus CEO and founding partner David Schiff. “Jack and his team have built some extraordinary companies, and we look forward to building something even more amazing out of these combined operations.”

“MTP has the kind of scale, focus and drive we were looking for,” adds Miller. “We’ve always been aggressive about business growth. Now we have an equally ambitious partner who can help us realize even greater potential.”

PALAZZO is pleased to announce the addition of Reuben Hendell as Senior Advisor, strengthening the firm's M&A and strategic advisory practices focused on building shareholder value for leading marketing and technology services companies.

Reuben has a successful track record working with independent and PE-backed businesses in the marketing and technology services sector to improve shareholder value by optimizing business and acquisition strategies, as well as implementing required operational improvements in all facets of the business. Reuben has led and built some of the world's most successful digital agencies including Digitas, MRM/McCann, GSI Commerce, and eBay Marketing. Recently, while at BlueAcorniCi Reuben led the effort with its private equity partner via a successful buy-and-build strategy to scale an ecommerce and marketing services powerhouse which later sold to Infosys.

"Reuben brings a wealth of industry knowledge and experience to the firm, mostly from the perspective of having sat in the seats of our clients and buyers." said founder Phil Palazzo. "The totality of his expertise and skills in strategy, corporate development, performance improvement, agency growth and execution will be a tremendous asset for our clients."

"I am excited to join PALAZZO and help support their continued effort to be the preeminent marketing and technology services M&A platform for middle market companies looking for their next stage of partnership and growth while helping them achieve premium value and the right partner."

Reuben earned an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a BA from Colgate University where he continues to serve as a senior advisor to "Thought Into Action", Colgate's entrepreneurial academy.

The acquisition of Giant Machines will greatly expand Deloitte's end-to-end digital product strategy and development capabilities

PALAZZO is pleased to announce it has served as exclusive financial advisor to Giant Machines, a leading software engineering and digital solution company based in New York City, on its sale to Deloitte. The Giant Machines business is focused on strategizing, designing and engineering innovative digital products, and will help bolster Deloitte Digital and Deloitte Engineering capabilities to offer clients a robust suite of services to deliver strategic and scaled engineering solutions.

Since its founding in 2015, Giant Machines has specialized in many aspects of product design and development, including market and user research, product strategy, prototyping, engineering and design, and product management. The team has developed large-scale, custom solutions for Fortune 500 companies across a wide array of industries, including climate tech, health care, public utilities and more. Giant Machines is also focused on shaping the future of engineering talent through inclusive and custom learning experiences — which will become part of Deloitte's existing, award-winning training programs.

"Today's organizations need to deliver on innovation and technology to keep pace with customer expectations and competitors. The Giant Machines product incubation and solutions services will scale our Deloitte Engineering and Deloitte Digital capabilities to help our clients accelerate product delivery and shape the next generation of innovation," said Tim Juravich, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

"We built Giant Machines into what it is today with a relentless focus on outcomes and by helping our clients to see a bigger picture," said Roy Yang, Giant Machines CEO. "It's that same philosophy that drew us to Deloitte. In joining Deloitte, I believe we can take our vision of creating tech that matters and advance it even further, providing greater opportunities for clients."

Globant Shakes the Creative and Tech Industries by acquiring GUT, Cannes Lions 2023's Independent Network of the Year

PALAZZO is pleased to announce it has served as exclusive financial advisor to GUT, Cannes Lions 2023’s Independent Network of the Year, on its sale to Globant. This acquisition will shape a partnership that will boost Globant’s technology and creative offering, taking it to a new level, and support GUT’s expansion to new markets and industries while leading the inception of technology into advertising.

“Technology and creativity have never been more closely linked than they are today,” said Martin Migoya, Co-founder and CEO of Globant. “We always say that Globant is where innovation, design, and engineering meet scale, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring the world’s most creative marketing and communications company into the mix. With this acquisition, we will be able to offer a unique blend of top-notch technology and bold ideas to brands from the very beginning of the creative ideation process.”

“We are thrilled to enter into this next chapter of our expansive growth powered by such an entrepreneurial and innovative partner as Globant, who will help us rapidly achieve the scale we’ve always dreamed about,” said Anselmo Ramos, Co-Founder and Creative Chairman of GUT. “Our mission when we founded GUT was to be the most diverse, creative, and influential agency Network ever, so we know that this reinvention with Globant will only accelerate that goal to hopefully becoming our reality soon.”

The five-year-old network has employees across seven offices in Miami, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Toronto, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam. It has also attracted over 60 clients globally, including AB InBev, Mercado Libre, Google, Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, and Tim Hortons.

This year, GUT was named Cannes Lions Independent Network of the Year after winning 35 Lions, including 3 Grand Prix, 8 Golds, 12 Silvers, and 12 Bronzes across its Network. GUT Buenos Aires was also named both Cannes Lions Agency of the Year and Independent Agency of the Year in 2023. And this fall, Adweek named GUT the Breakthrough Agency of the Year, as well as GUT Buenos Aires office as the International Agency of the Year.

GUT will remain operating as fully independent as it does today, and GUT’s leadership team will remain in place with a continued focus on building culture and driving growth. Both companies will work together identifying cross-selling opportunities and leveraging their unique skills to provide even more innovative solutions to their customers.

“Globant has been a trusted client for many years. We’ve done so many wonderful and successful things together as an agency and client, and now together, we know they will help us realize the dreams we’ve had since we were founded in 2018,” said Gaston Bigio, Co-Founder and Creative Chairman of GUT. “Ultimately, we’re excited to be part of the team that will propel us into the next phase of growth and success at GUT, and set us up for even more growth and success in the long term for our People and clients around the world.”

“GUT and Globant share a solid culture, endless passion for supporting their clients, and a strong commitment to bravery, creativity, and innovation”, said Martin Umaran, Co-Founder and Chief Corporate Development Officer of Globant. “In past years, Globant doubled-down on its inherent creative side of technology by adding marketing and advertising agencies such as Habitant, in Spain, Vertic, in Denmark, Ad_Bid, in Colombia, and KTBO, in Mexico. We have already merged these teams with Globant’s own Digital Marketing and Digital Sales Studios to create a new end-to-end Studio Network with an agency approach enhanced with AI and diverse and talented professionals. GUT will play a critical role in being part of this Network”, he added.

Both organizations are ranked among the top ten global organizations in their respective industries: Globant is the 8th strongest IT brand globally according to the latest Brand Finance report, and GUT is the most creative independent advertising network in the world according to Cannes 2023 Report – forming a powerful global creative tech company poised for even greater growth. Globant was also included by Fortune on its latest list of “100 Fastest-Growing Companies”, ranked first among peers in the Information Technology Services category and recognized for its revenue, profit and stock return over the last three years.

The new partnership will help Dualboot accelerate its investments in global delivery talent and execute strategic acquisitions​​​​​​​

PALAZZO is pleased to announce it has served as exclusive financial advisor to Dualboot Partners, a leading provider of digital product design and software development services to start-ups and Fortune 500 companies, in securing an investment from Insignia Capital Group.

Dualboot leverages a fulsome set of software engineering capabilities delivered by 370+ team members across a unique, decentralized infrastructure of global support centers in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The company specializes in building and maintaining mission-critical solutions which are highly strategic to their clients’ businesses.

Dualboot’s delivery teams are led by senior, U.S.-based product directors and comprised of talented offshore technologists, bringing a strong mix of business savvy and robust technical expertise to each client engagement. This unique and highly efficient operating model has facilitated rapid scaling of the business and tremendous value creation for clients.​​​​​​​

Insignia’s investment will support Dualboot’s global delivery center expansion and will help the company execute strategic acquisitions to strengthen its portfolio of in-demand digital transformation capabilities and services.​​​​​​​