Visually CEO Matt Cooper
ScribbleLive CEO Vince Mifsud
Toronto’s ScribbleLive has filled an important hole in its content marketing services by buying Visually, a company that specializes in creating visual content like infographics, whitepapers and video.
Visually will add its network of content creators, content production software, its significant U.S. clientbase and many of its executives to ScribbleLive’s platform.
ScribbleLive, based in Toronto, uses data science to help brands decide what subjects to create content around, distribute their content across various web channels, and measure the impact of their campaigns.
CEO Vincent Mifsud said that as it has developed its software-as-a-service business across Canada, a lot of clients have gotten stuck on the question of who will create content for their campaigns. “A lot of these organizations don’t have the resources and the people to do the content creation,” he said. “Visually fits in nicely, enabling that piece of the puzzle.”
Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, Visually has put together a platform that helps brands recruit content creators and streamlines content workflow and delivery, solving exactly that problem. With those capabilities added to ScribbleLive, Mifsud said the platform will be much more of a one-stop shop for content marketing.
Visually CEO Matt Cooper will take over as vice-president of ScribbleLive’s marketplace for syndicated content while he continues to run the Visually platform until it is fully integrated. “The long-term vision is you’ll have one place to go to get custom, bespoke content through Visually’s process, you can get syndicated content through different media channels, you can get live feeds, you can get potentially stock photography,” Cooper told Marketing. “We’re going to look at all the different types of content that our clients need to get all the leverage out of the Scribble platform that they can.”
In addition to Cooper, Visually vice-president of marketing Ural Cebeci will take on a broader role as VP of marketing for ScribbleLive.
Visually also has more than 1,000 U.S. clients that ScribbleLive hopes to extend its business to. Mifsud said ScribbLive’s U.S. business has so far focused on the east coast, but acquiring a sales and marketing team in California will help jumpstart their development there.
ScribbleLive, founded in 2008 as a liveblogging platform for publishers, has seem dramatic success in recent years as it’s pivoted to work with brands on content marketing. It’s raised nearly $60 million in capital, and in 2015 it was ranked 13th on the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, breaking the top 15 for the second year in a row.
Mifsud said the next steps for the platform will be to continue developing its data-driven planning software. On the Visually side, it will also be expanding its tools and creator base beyond visual-focused content into research and writing as well.
