Cultural relevance is big business as marketing and entertainment collide — and M&A is cashing in

“For a long while, we’ve been witnessing the death of the campaign and the birth of the cultural moment. Traditional advertising is entertainment’s understudy, while brands are learning merely to be protagonists in culture stories,” James Kirkham, co-founder of brand consultancy Iconic, explained.

Nowhere is this crossover sharper than in the creator economy, where marketing and entertainment collide. Creators and influencers, once on the fringes, are now central to investment strategies, shaping how brands chase cultural relevance.

Naturally, dealmakers are eager to cash in. Publicis Groupe’s swoop for Influential, Stagwell’s purchase Leaders and Trouble Maker’s move for branded entertainment production studio The Outfit were just a few of last year’s moves riding this wave. And if the early momentum is any indication, 2025 is set to deliver plenty more.

Case in point: Later, a social media and influencer marketing company, has bought social commerce app Mavely for $250 million. Why? To tap into the growing marketer obsession with influencer marketing as a performance play. Mavely’s model, which pays creators commissions for the sales they drive, appeals to those senses by giving them ROI with a side of cultural relevance.

“When we run campaigns for clients we’re leveraging the data we’ve amassed from over 350 million posts on our social platforms alongside 3 million influencer activations,” Scott Sutton, CEO of Later,  explained. “On Mavely, we’ll now see millions of transaction details from their 120,000 creators and over a billion dollars in gross merchandising volume (GMV). So when we go to work with a brand, we now can predict performance with great accuracy and drive provable ROI for them.”

The fact that Sutton is already eyeing more deals beyond Mavely speaks volumes. For brands, creators aren’t the endgame — they’re the means to an end. And that end is clear: provable performance wrapped in cultural relevance.

“Whilst technology has become increasingly important to everyone for efficiency purposes, we’ve seen that brands actually want to understand what’s culturally relevant to be authentic,” said Matthew Lacey, partner at M&A advisory firm Waypoint Partners. ”We’ve long anticipated the collision of these worlds, and its finally starting to happen.”

In many ways, it already is. The trickle of creative-focused deals is showing signs of turning into a full-blown flood.

Among those to watch is Common Interest, the marketing holding group positioning itself at the heart of this marketing-entertainment crossover. Its founders are on an M&A spree, building a network of companies designed to arm CMOs with the tools they need to craft, support and measure strategies rooted in cultural relevance.

“2023 saw numerous brands asking themselves and their partners ‘how do I Barbify this brief,’” said founder Anthony Freedman, a former Havas regional chair. “Alongside that it felt there was renewed interest in brand more broadly, no doubt in part due to the continuing pressured economy where cost increases needed to be passed onto consumers, and recognition that strong brands are better positioned to do this without widespread customer churn.”

This reality has played out repeatedly in the post-pandemic landscape, where companies with the strongest brands demonstrated better price elasticity — read: they could raise prices without losing customers. The industry, while slow to act, is beginning to catch on.

For example, WPP’s acquisition of New Commercial Arts, Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games and the launch of LVMH’s entertainment division all underline a growing recognition of the need to align marketing, entertainment and cultural relevance. Each deal, in its own way, reflects this refocus — not urgently but with deliberate intent.

“When WPP acquires creative powerhouses and Disney pours billions into gaming, they’re acknowledging that cultural currency is the only currency that truly matters,” said Kirkham. “Epic Games and Disney are both the real architects of tomorrow’s brand experiences. Boundaries between marketing, entertainment and culture become beautifully blurred.”

As M&A activity heats up, the question isn’t if this trend will continue — it’s how far it will go.