G2 eyes 3 agencies

G2, the specialised marketing services wing of the advertising agency Grey Worldwide, is close to acquiring three small to medium agencies in the digital marketing space in India.

The acquisitions, expected to materialise over the next two months, will double the workforce of G2 in India from 350 to 700, sources close to the development told Business Standard.

Declining to comment on the value of the acquisitions, sources said the acquired companies would help G2 to move to a full service creative agency in the digital domain.

"At present, most of our activities in the digital advertising space is concentrated on web designing and website uploading among others. More focus needs to be given to search engine optimisation," they said.

Recently, G2, which is on a global acquisition spree, bought Refinery, an interactive media agency in Pennsylvania, USA, and another called Star Echo in China last month.

On a visit to India, Martin Sorrell, head of WPP Group that owns Grey and G2, had spoken about the company's intention to grow inorganically to surge ahead of the competition in the digital space.

Nirvik Singh, chief executive, Asia Pacific, G2, declined to comment on the Indian acquisitions. However, Singh said the scope of digital advertising in India was huge.

"The future of advertising lies in data collection. A correlation between data collection and call centre activities will be the next stage in digital advertising. Some Asian countries like Vietnam have already started this process where consumers are given incentives to fill out assessment forms and this data is collected and digitised. Call centres later follow up with customers to verify this data and the findings are stored to provide more personalised service to the customer," he said.