Sam Balsara's Madison Media has bought a majority, controlling stake in performance marketing agency HiveMinds. HiveMinds is a 6 year old digital agency firm with Search, Social, Performance Marketing & Programmatic buying capabilities. HiveMinds was founded by Jyothirmayee JT. Typically, an agency acquisition is for one or more of three things: people, client base and technology. From a technology perspective, HiveMinds apparently has a "market intelligence stack" called INTUTEL, which Madison says that when combined with their programmatic platform CLEAR TRADE, will "enable Brands to measure and improve customer interaction touch points". Maybe Madison ought to have bought a web design firm, because their website looks like it was made 10 years ago. HiveMinds employs 70 people, and focuses on search, social and performance marketing, with specialisation in eCommerce, education and travel. Its clients include BigBasket, ABOF, ClearTrip, CloudNine Hospitals among others. For Madison, the idea would be to get people with competence in these segments and offer the services to their existing clients; it could also be about offering HiveMinds' clients services from the Madison portfolio. The other reason for acquisition or launch, sometimes, is about expanding a client base in an industry, to deal with conflict of interest when the agency is trying to pitch business to two competing clients. Madison Media caters to clients like Godrej, Marico, Titan, Asian Paints, Raymond, TVS, Ceat, Blue Star, UBER and the BJP. Its digital clients include Marico, Asian Paints, Godrej Properties, Tata Chemicals and ITC among many others use its…
