Emerald yesterday announced that it has completed the acquisition of all of the assets comprising the business known as Advertising Week from Stillwell Partners.
Advertising Week (AW) is a global event and thought leadership platform focused on marketing, media, technology, and culture. Founded in 2004 in New York, AW’s global event franchise includes: AWNewYork (NYC), AWEurope (London); AWAsia (Tokyo); AWLATAM (Mexico City); AWAPAC (Sydney).
In addition to live and virtual events, the year round global content platform also contains e-learning from some of the world’s leading practitioners (AWLearn), and original audio, video, and editorial content (AW360), says the publisher.
The acquisition of AW signifies a step forward in Emerald’s 365-customer engagement strategy of delivering connected experiences through integrating in-person events, content and commerce. Through this acquisition, Emerald will build on its position in the B2B marketing sector where it serves the marketing technology community via its Demand Gen Report media platform and B2B Marketing Exchange in-person event series.
For Advertising Week, the acquisition provides access to complementary customers within Emerald’s businesses – including small and medium sized businesses across varied sectors and its retail and design portfolios - and greater resources and scale to accelerate Advertising Week’s expansion and growth.
According to Emerald, Advertising Week attracts more than 100,000 annual attendees at its hybrid events; over 3,000 speakers per year; produces more than 1,000 video content hours and generates more than 25 billion event PR impressions.
Advertising Week continued to serve the advertising, marketing, media and technology communities throughout the pandemic while diversifying its event offerings into virtual and hybrid editions. In addition, Advertising Week has continued to build its offerings both globally and year-round via development of new original content franchises and digital education under the AWLEARN platform.
Following the acquisition, all Advertising Week employees will join Emerald, including co-founder and Advertising Week chairman Matt Scheckner, co-founder and Advertising Week CEO Lance Pillersdorf and Advertising Week’s global president Ruth Mortimer, who will continue to lead the day-to-day operations of the business, utilizing their knowledge and experience in the event and content platforms.
Hervé Sedky, Emerald’s president and CEO, said, “This exciting potential to join forces with Advertising Week represents an important next step in the implementation of our strategic initiatives and underscores our commitment to evolve and grow our customers’ businesses 365 days a year combining creativity and innovation with the Emerald platform.” Since the reopening of most municipalities in June 2021 through Q2 2022 to date, Emerald, under Sedky’s leadership, has successfully staged 117 in-person trade shows, conferences and other events, serving approximately 328,000 attendees and 17,000 exhibiting companies.
Emerald CFO David Doft, who has led the conversations for Emerald added, “We have long admired Advertising Week’s best in class reputation for being ahead of the curve serving the influential advertising, marketing, media and technology sectors which I have experienced personally as both an attendee and sponsor over the course of my career. Its signature blend of thought leadership on the business of the business with highly curated experiential events will diversify our collective product offerings, enhance our growth profile and enable us to deliver even greater value to our clients and customers over the long term.”
Matt Scheckner, Stillwell Partners co-founder and Advertising Week chairman said: “Fuelling growth is at the heart of this partnership with Emerald as we seek to unlock the future opportunities put in place to date. Moving beyond organic growth by integrating with a larger organization with additional resources is the right next step in our evolution as a business for today, and for tomorrow. We chose Emerald because it clearly values the unique aspects of our brand, have committed to our leadership team led by Lance and Ruth, bring an intuitive knowledge of our industry, and are passionate about supporting growth.”
Lance Pillersdorf, Stillwell Partners co-founder and Advertising Week CEO added: “After completing our first phase of global expansion pre-pandemic, we are now focused on our next phase of growth. The momentum of change in the global marketing industry through the impact of rapid cultural and technological evolution has provided us with multiple growth opportunities. Accelerating these growth opportunities around content, education, further global expansion and our proprietary technology is at the heart of this partnership with Emerald. Herve, David and the Emerald team are the perfect growth partners to help us realize these plans.”
