Rosetta Acquires LEVEL Studios — Firms Interested In The Future Of Online Experience Take Note!
Earlier this week, Rosetta announced that it acquired LEVEL Studios, an agency I recently profiled in my Q&Agency series. This is an interesting acquisition that demonstrates once again how marketing is becoming a more experience-driven business. Rosetta, a large interactive agency (one of the top 10 in size according to AdAge) that focuses on personality-based marketing, is looking to expand its impact to connected devices to broaden its capabilities to deliver quality customer experiences. To do this, it turned to an agency that has already had success with this: LEVEL Studios. LEVEL’s technology capabilities have allowed it to design and deliver relevant experiences across a variety of devices. My first reaction was that this would make a really strong partnership for both clients and each of the agencies, respectively.
So what does this mean for clients? If I was a client of either agency, I’d be excited to start the conversation with my account manager about how the new acquisition could quickly add value to my account — especially if my project had some element of interface design involved. Why? Forrester believes that online experiences of the future will be customized by the end user, aggregated at the point of use, relevant to the moment, and social as a rule and not an exception. (For more on this, check out our CARS model.) To capitalize on this vision, firms need to have a strong understanding of their users, how they use a variety of interfaces and technology, as well as design experiences that are relevant for those new interfaces — something that Rosetta and LEVEL Studios can do. When agencies make acquisitions, they’re usually eager to demonstrate the value of those new acquisitions with key accounts they can use as a model. With this mix of skills, I’d be interested to see how they could add value to my vision for the future.