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BFD Expert Voices - Media Deals

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🥂 We're hosting another Meet the Dealmakers reception in NYC tonight, this time on the deals aspect of women's sports. Hope to see you there!

Her Campus Media has brought on Soros Fund Management (SFM) as a growth equity partner, CEO Stephanie Kaplan Lewis exclusively tells Axios.

Why it matters: The deal marks the company's first outside investor after operating independently for 15 years.  

Context: Her Campus Media was founded in 2009 by Lewis, president Windsor Western and chief product officer and chief creative officer Annie Wang when they were undergraduates at Harvard. 

The Boston-based company has a portfolio of media brands targeted to college women and Gen Z, including Her Campus, College Fashionista, Spoon University, InfluenceHer Collective, Campus Trendsetters and Generation Hired. 

Her Campus has doubled its revenue over the past three years, Lewis says. The company has about 100 employees and operates remotely.

Driving the news: Lewis says Her Campus Media sought out a financial partner to further scale the business and got to know SFM over the past year. 

"We came to understand that [SFM] believes wholeheartedly in the Her Campus Media company, vision and mission. It was clear that they really love what we do and aren't looking to change it but are looking to help us accelerate into our next stage of growth," Lewis says.

SFM, the principal asset manager for George Soros' Open Society Foundations, has other media investments such as Crooked Media, Audacy, Vice Media and Latino Media Network. 

Zoom in: Lewis says the deal will not change day-to-day operations. 

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The founders remain significant shareholders, Lewis says.

Pharus served as exclusive financial adviser, JonesSpross as legal adviser and Crowe as the accounting firm to Her Campus Media. Schulte Roth & Zabel served as legal adviser to SFM.

What's next: Lewis says SFM will help support more acquisitions as it looks at other media companies along with products and services for creators.

Flashback: Her Campus Media has grown through a series of six acquisitions. 

It acquired U.K.-based HerUni in 2013, lifestyle-focused Lala Media Group in 2019, fashion-focused College Fashionista in 2019, food-focused Spoon University in 2019, assets of influencer marketing agency Endorsify in 2020 and influencer marketing platform Zfluence in 2023.

Exclusive ... Her Campus Media sells stake

Illustration of a pennant made out of a hundred dollar bill.  

Marketing giant Stagwell has acquired Tel Aviv-based digital agency Leaders and its influencer marketing software. 

Why it's the BFD: The deal underscores continued investment in AI-powered marketing and communications tools as well as marketers' increased interest in influencers.

The big picture: Software and expertise supporting influencer marketing comes amid growing demand given that type of marketing's current performance and expected ongoing success.

U.S. influencer marketing spend will grow 14.7% to $5.89 billion this year with 82.7% of marketers using the channel, per Insider Intelligence.

A flurry of influencer marketing platforms emerged amid the rise of social media. While some tools address the specific needs of working with influencers and analyzing performance, marketers also crave the simplicity that has fueled consolidation by ad giants. 

Case in point: WPP previously acquired Village Marketing, Obviously and Goat. The Brandtech Group (formerly You & Mr Jones) bought Collectively. 

Zoom in: Leaders' InfluencerMarketing.AI (IMAI) connects brands — like Nespresso, Samsung and Colgate-Palmolive — with more than 300 million creators globally. The platform allows marketers to launch and manage campaigns. 

The agency will sit within Stagwell Marketing Cloud's PRophet Comms Tech Suite, which is led by Aaron Kwittken, and will bring the total headcount to 75 people globally.

"This team will be PRophet's innovation engine for rapid prototyping, testing, and commercializing AI solutions that evolve modern marketers into communications engineers," Kwittken tells Axios.

Zoom out: The acquisition is Stagwell's seventh of 2024.

It acquired U.S. culturalist creative agency Team Epiphany, U.K. experiential agency Sidekick, French marketing consultancy What's Next Partners, Brazilian marketing consultancy PROS, trade publication Business Traveller and U.S. analytics platform BERA.

Stagwell taps into influencers

Illustration of a social media "like" icon made out of a $100 bill.

Go deeper in our full database in the Axios Pro Deals Tracker.

• Posh, a social media platform for small events, raised a $22m Series A led by Goodwater Capital, along with FirstMark Capital, Companyon Ventures and Epic Ventures. Go deeper

• W, Jake Paul's men's body care brand, raised $14m in seed and Series A funding led by Shrug Capital and Anti Fund. Go deeper

• Submix, a music tech startup, raised $1m in pre-seed funding to support its launch from Angel Invest Ventures, SCNE, TSIC (Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company) and Vesna Capital, among others. Go deeper

• Share Ventures, a venture studio for startups supporting longevity and the future of work led by MoviePass co-founder Hamet Watt, raised nearly $20m from investors like Alphabet and Amazon. Go deeper

• Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter, the former Marvel Entertainment chairman who backed Trian Partners' proxy battle against Disney and has been one of Disney's largest independent shareholders, sold his entire stake. Go deeper

• Informa, a U.K. events group, agreed to acquire Ascential (LSE: ASCL), which owns Cannes Lions and other conferences, for more than £1.2b. Go deeper

• T-Mobile (Nasdaq: TMUS) and KKR agreed to acquire Metronet, a U.S. fiber-to-the-home operator, from Oak Hill Capital and the Cinelli family. Go deeper

Deal flow

• Alain Tascan, formerly EVP of game development at Epic Games, joined Netflix's game division as president. Go deeper

• Alex Maggioni was promoted to head of TV and Zac Locke was promoted to head of business affairs at Laika. Go deeper

• The BBC said it would lay off 500 more staff by March 2026. Go deeper

Movin' on up (or out)

😞 What's ailing 'Euphoria'? Tragedy and trauma inside TV's buzziest show (THR)

"It falls to chief Casey Bloys and head of drama Francesca Orsi to pull this vexing third season of 'Euphoria' together … and keep it together. It might be the ultimate executive challenge: persuading various difficult talents to row in the same direction after there have been real or perceived betrayals of trust," Kim Masters reports.

🤖 Colin Kaepernick launches new AI startup (WSJ)

"Lumi Story AI, which is backed by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian's venture-capital firm Seven Seven Six, plans to use AI's capabilities to give aspiring creators tools they might otherwise not have access to," Andrew Beaton writes.

😡 Exclusive: 6 ad companies accuse Pluto TV of exploiting programmatic auctions (Adweek)

"At the center of these concerns is a practice called bid duplication, where publishers and their tech partners send out multiple opportunities to buy a single ad. Bid duplication tricks programmatic platforms into thinking a publisher has more scale than it really does," Catherine Perloff writes.

Channel surfing

Illustration of a TV color test screen in the shape of a wave.

@tim_bays: "Time Bandits" on Apple TV+. Not sure anyone can capture the manic-ness of Terry Gilliam, but Taika Waititi will surely try. 

@kerrymflynn: "Snowpiercer" on AMC. It's back, no thanks to David Zaslav! I almost didn't believe it when it popped up as a suggested show.

✏️ Thanks to George Moriarty for editing and Katie Lewis for copy editing this newsletter.

Thank you for reading Axios Pro Media Deals! Please ask your friends, colleagues and Gen Z to sign up.

July 24, 2024

1 big thing: Exclusive ... Her Campus Media sells stake