Why Lions is buying Effie: to help brands make ‘better case’ for investing in marketing

The bosses of Lions and Effie say clients will benefit from their two organisations coming together because they will have access to “hundreds of thousands” of case studies that will help brands to make a better case for investing in marketing.

That is one of the main reasons why Lions wanted to buy Effie, according to Phil Thomas, the chief executive of Ascential, the parent company of Lions, and Traci Alford, the chief executive of Effie, who spoke to Campaign in a joint interview.

The owner of Cannes Lions first announced the planned acquisition in August and is awaiting regulatory approval from the attorney-general of the state of New York, which is the main shareholder in Effie, a US-based not-for-profit. 

Alford said Effie generates about 70% of its revenues from its advertising effectiveness awards, which run in more than 125 markets globally, and Thomas said acquiring the Effie Awards was “an attraction” from a commercial perspective.

Lions, which was founded in 1954, and Effie, which was founded in 1968, are the two most important awards “benchmarks” in global advertising, he suggested.

However, Thomas said there is a greater “strategic rationale” than just running awards because the two organisations will be able to combine their archives of case studies and make better use of the data within them.

That will “help our mission”, which is “to make marketers better prepared for arguing for investment in creative marketing” – at a time when there is still a risk of a “disconnect” between creativity and business outcomes, Thomas explained.

“The problem we’re trying to solve is that marketers are in a constant battle for capital allocation into marketing. They’ve got CFOs and CEOs who are sceptical and it’s really hard to argue for the power of marketing.”

Thomas went on: “Marketers are not interested in creativity as an end in itself. What they're interested in is they understand deeply that creativity drives their organisations forward, but they need to be able to prove it. 

“They need the data, the evidence, to prove it, and certainly the evidence that we collect does prove it. Our belief is, the more data we have from Effie, the more we can link creativity to effectiveness, and that is the absolute heart of what we're trying to do and what the industry wants us to do.”

Alford said Effie will gain scale and “many opportunities” by becoming part of Lions and it will also continue the not-for-profit work of the Effie Foundation because the two organisations plan to set up the Effie Lions Foundation to provide education and support to young people and underrepresented groups.

The new foundation is a key part of the Lions-Effie deal, because there is still “quite a lot of work” needed to improve accessibility and inclusion in advertising, Thomas and Alford said, adding they will invest “multiple millions of dollars”.

Ascential’s sale to Informa is about to complete

The acquisition of Effie comes at the same time as Ascential is in the final stage of completing its own £1.2 billion ($1.6 billion) sale to Informa, the FTSE-100 UK events and information giant–with shares in Ascential due to stop trading on the London Stock Exchange tomorrow (8 October). 

Stephen Carter, the chief executive of Informa, knows the advertising and media industries because he previously ran JWT, Brunswick and Ofcom.

News of the Informa-Ascential deal in July did not stop Thomas from announcing the acquisition of Effie in August.

Lions and Effie were in talks for about 14 months but Thomas revealed in a LinkedIn post that he had first looked at a potential acquisition in 2011.

“I’m quite good at keeping records of all my old emails,” he told Campaign, explaining how he had found his first communication with Matt Seiler, the then chairman of Effie, from 13 years ago.

Both Lions and Effie have been growing. Effie had annual turnover of $10.1 million (£7.7 million) in 2022, up 12%, on a year earlier, and roughly double its $5.2 million sales in 2019, according to figures from US news website ProPublica.

Lions had £130.5 million ($171 million) in annual revenue in 2023, up 22% on an organic basis, and reported a further increase of 15% in H1 2024, as double-digit growth in delegate numbers and sponsorship offset a 1% decline in the volume of award entries at Cannes Lions.

'Events-led' strategy to drive growth from other products and services

Ascential, which was formed out of the B2B arm of Emap, has been through a major reorganisation in recent years as it has focused on two areas, marketing (Lions) and finance (primarily Money 20/20) and sold its digital commerce arm, Flywheel, to Omnicom and its fashion trends business, WGSN, to Apax Partners.

Under Thomas’ leadership, Lions has made a series of acquisitions, including Warc, a data and insights company, in 2018, and Contagious, a creative intelligence and consulting business, in 2023, and he said buying Effie has a similar logic “to help marketers in their challenges every day”.

He explained how Lions is an “events-led” platform – with the five-day Cannes Lions festival in June as a primary focus and then, “off the power of that event”, it has driven revenues from other products and services such as Warc and Contagious all year round.

Lions also runs the Eurobest awards, the Dubai Lynx festival and a joint venture, Spikes Asia, with Haymarket, the owner of Campaign.

Thomas hosted a capital markets day for Ascential’s investors at Cannes in June–just weeks before Informa made its bid–where he showed how Lions has integrated Warc and moved Contagious onto the same content management system to drive digital subscriptions and renewals.

Asked by Campaign whether he expects Lions to make further acquisitions, following the planned Effie deal, Thomas said: “There are other businesses that we want to include in our portfolio.”

He was not specific but said potential targets would be “complementary” and “get us somewhere faster than we could ourselves”.

Lions acquiring Effie was “a much more preferable option” than trying to launch its own global effectiveness awards programme from scratch, which would likely be “an absolute nightmare”, Thomas said.

Effie runs the Effie Awards in the US, UK and China and operates them under licence in most other countries – sometimes using the same representatives as Lions in those local markets.