Toronto-based social analytics company Engagement Labs has acquired U.S. word-of-mouth research firm The Keller Fay Group in a cash and stock deal worth approximately $5 million.
Keller Fay measures the word-of-mouth impact of brand campaigns using a combination of surveys and diary reporting. Panelists track brand mentions in face-to-face, phone and online conversations. In the U.S., Keller Fay has tracked about 400,000 conversational brand mentions per year since 2006. (The company doesn’t yet have a panel in Canada.)
Engagement Labs plans to integrate Keller Fay’s brand conversation measurement into its social media analytics to give clients a full view of how campaigns influence consumers both on and offline.
Bryan Segal, Engagement Labs’ CEO, says the U.S. firm was a natural fit. “We feel there is a big opportunity understanding the total value of conversations both online and offline, to get a total social perspective,” he said. “The main reason we acquired Keller Fay is for that exact reason – to run the gamut and be able to determine the total power of conversations across online and offline.”
Segal said that although many Canadian marketers won’t have heard the name, Keller Fay has been the “de facto standard” in word-of-mouth measurement for nearly a decade in the U.S. Co-founder Ed Keller has been president of the U.S. Word of Mouth Marketing Council (WOMMA) and published several books on the subject. He and co-founder Brad Fay have worked with brands like AT&T and Toyota, and agencies like Omnicom and Universal McCann.
Engagement Labs’ core product is its eValue social scoring metric, which ranks 100,000 brands by how they perform across social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Engagement Labs also provides detailed reports on what contributes to a brand’s eValue score, and how they can improve their social strategy.
Segal said that with the addition of a word-of-mouth component to Engagement Labs’ platform, brands will get a sense of how social media affects offline conversations, and vice-versa. Initially, Engagement Labs will offer online and offline social reporting separately, but eventually it will also debut a combined product.
“They’re two different platforms, so you want to understand each impact on its own, but then there is the need to understand the total, unduplicated impact of both online and offline conversations — so folding them together to have a total score,” Segal said.
The acquisition adds roughly 20 new staff to Engagement Labs. The deal was mostly stock, with an up-front cash payment of $534,000 funded by a recent $8 million financing deal led by Cormark Securities (Engagement Labs is public, and listed on the TSX Venture). Keller Fay’s annual revenue for 2014 was $3.65 million.
