M&A Platform Success Story: GroupM

GroupM uses an M&A platform to successfully evaluate 450+ deals per year.

GroupM logo

Headquarters
New York, NY, USA

Employees
> 30,000

Annual Billings
$108 Billion

Robert Schneider
Global Head of Corporate Development

GroupM is the world’s largest media investment group and is responsible for one in three ads globally.

  • High velocity of deals – evaluating in excess of 450 targets per year;
  • Many cross-border deals in high-growth markets;
  • Using an end-to-end M&A Platform is critical to success.

We are a very well-known entity in the M&A space and our deal flow as a consequence is very robust. Last year, we looked at over 450 deals – so on average, more than one deal per day.

We operate our business in over 90 markets, so a lot of our deals are cross-border – especially in high-growth markets. We prefer to take a proactive approach to deal origination and source our own deals before they even become deals – these must align with our strategic priorities. With closing deals being central to supporting the growth strategy of GroupM it’s important we can evaluate targets with speed and in a systematic manner. This is just one example of where using an M&A Platform is critical to our success.

The traditional approach to M&A wouldn’t work for us due to the volume of deals we work on – connecting multiple ways of working is inefficient, slow and causes an unnecessary distraction from the more important aspects of a deal. Using technology to streamline our M&A process not only helps in sourcing deals and managing the initial pipeline of targets but across due diligence and into integration as well.

We have a systematic process by which we work across the various stages of a deal lifecycle. We find this is essential – especially given the high volume of targets and geographic complexity of most of our deals. Having said that, at times we have to deviate from our standard playbook – but in having best practices in place and a trusted technology solution helps us make these deviations a lot more successful.

One of the biggest improvements in our M&A process has been the leveraging of technology to help drive the efficiency of projects across the deal lifecycle. Without having the proper technology in place, we would very easily be overwhelmed by the volume of deals we are working on. Additionally, having the right technology to help develop and act upon lessons learned and connect various teams/parts of the organization that might not be engaging in the deal process on a regular basis has been really critical to our success.

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