London, 7 March 2023 – Advent International (“Advent”), one of the world’s largest and most experienced private equity investors, has entered into an agreement to sell Tag, a leading global omnichannel marketing production company, to Dentsu Group Inc. (Tokyo: 4324; ISIN: JP3551520004), one of world’s largest global marketing and advertising agency networks.

In the past five years, Advent has invested more than €100 million in Tag, which has grown to become a leading global end-to-end, tech enabled marketing activation platform. Tag’s global footprint and offerings have expanded substantially, it has developed an end to end proprietary marketing execution platform called Digital Interact (Di) and acquired six strategic businesses, enhancing Tag’s CGI, e-commerce, content origination, and data analytics capabilities. Tag now has a truly global presence, with a world class diverse leadership team who oversee 2,800 employees in over 29 countries across EMEA, APAC and the Americas. Tag’s end-to-end platform provides digital, personalised marketing for many of the world’s leading brands.

James Brocklebank, Managing Partner at Advent International, said, “Since acquiring Tag in 2017, and following more than €100 million of investment, the business has been transformed to become a highly successful standalone entity that is now one of the world’s leading omnichannel digital marketing production companies.”

Chris Benson, Director at Advent International, said, “We have worked in partnership with Tag’s leadership team to build a world leader in marketing activation. Under Advent’s ownership, the company has grown significantly and continues to achieve double digit organic revenue growth. We are excited for Tag and dentsu to build on this success and we wish David Kassler and his team all the best as they start this next phase of their journey.”

David Kassler, Global CEO, Tag, said, “We can’t wait to start this next phase of our journey and couldn’t be happier to be joining the dentsu family. The market is moving incredibly fast towards integrated services – the combination of Tag’s global technology-enabled content production with dentsu’s broader marketing, technology and consulting skills will be tremendously additive for both sets of our wonderful clients.”

Advent acquired Williams Lea Tag from Deutsche Post DHL Group in December 2017, before successfully separating Williams Lea and Tag into standalone businesses. Williams Lea, a high growth provider of tech-enabled business support services for a hybrid workforce, serving some of the world’s largest financial, legal and consulting firms, remains under Advent’s ownership.

Evercore, UBS, Weil, EY, and PWC acted as advisors to Advent.