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The Marketing Group buys stake in Singapore micro-influencer company Narratrs

After a quiet spell, The Marketing Group has jumped back on the acquisitions bandwagon by buying a minority stake in a Singaporean influencer platform.

The Sweden-listed holding company has bought 14 per cent of Narratrs, an agency which claims to “connect brands with a community of trusted and authentic micro-influencers”.

According to a press statement from the company, Narratrs uses “big data, AI powered, web and mobile automation platform to manage influencer marketing at scale” through programmatic buying.

The platform is owned by Laurent Verrier, whose company One9Ninety was one of the founding four agencies to join TMG in 2016.

The acquisition comes two months after TMG’s expulsion of fellow co-founding agency Black Marketing Singapore, which was owned by Chris Reed.

Both TMG and Reed have said they are mulling legal action against the other following the relationship’s termination.

Founded in summer 2016, TMG went on a major acquisition push that saw it buy 17 companies within its first six months.

The company went for an early IPO on Sweden’s First North, from when its stock soared from €1 at listing to a remarkable €9 on the market’s close on August 1 2016.

However, last year TMG’s share price has collapse to below €0.40c, putting a stopped in its shopping spree. Today the share price languishes at €0.29.

The purchase of Narratrs marks the company’s first tentatives steps back into company acquisitions. In the meantime TMG formed its own blockchain programmatic agency, Truth, which is claiming to offer clients 100 per cent transparency with their automated trading.

TMG CEO Adam Graham said: “Our investment in Narratrs supports our platform based approach to global marketing and is highly complementary to our service offering. It enables us to deploy campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands in a rapidly expanding market place. We are very excited by Narratrs’ growth trajectory and future opportunities.”

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