Remark Media today announced it was acquiring a marketing and digital content company that works with a number of high-profile corporations and produces content on Hollywood events, sports and celebrity news for Chinese media audiences.
Remark, a digital marketing company that specializes in reaching millennials, will acquire China Branding Group for $7.5 million in cash, plus 6.25 million shares of Remark Media common stock, purchased at a $10 strike price, a release from the company said. The deal is set to be completed by the end of June.
“Acquiring CBG will greatly advance our efforts to execute on the large-scale opportunity within the highly lucrative millennial demographic in the two largest consumer markets in the world,” Remark CEO Kai-Shing Tao said in a release.
CBG, based in Los Angeles and Shanghai, produces programs and advertising spots featuring such American celebrities and athletes as Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Alicia Keys and NBA stars Kevin Durant, Dwyane Wade and DeMar DeRozan. CBG's advertising customer base includes Coca-Cola, AB InBev and Red Bull.
CBG distributes most of its content over social media, where it handles celebrities' social media profiles across popular Asian platforms, like Wechat, QQ and Weibo, as well as clients' Chinese-speaking platforms on Facebook and Twitter, Tao said. With over 900 million social media users in Asia, the continent has as many as five times more users than North America.
The company also owns exclusive broadcasting rights in China to awards shows like the Golden Globes, Billboard Music Awards and American Music Awards, the release said.
Remark, which was located in Atlanta before moving to Las Vegas in 2013, operates a suite of websites and apps that includes the beachwear online boutique bikini.com, several tax and banking sites, a Chinese-language education portal and a hotel-booking mobile service. The company also operates in Beijing and has an office in Hangzhou, China.
In March, Tao’s company announced an expanded partnership with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba as part of an effort to bolster KanKan, a mobile application that aggregates and organizes billions of data points from major international social networks. Last August, Remark purchased Vegas.com, one of Las Vegas’ largest online travel booking sites, from The Greenspun Corporation.
Remark increased its net revenue to $14.3 million in the first quarter of 2016, up $13.5 million from the same period a year earlier, which the company attributed to its acquisition of Vegas.com last year.
Tao said Remark planned to combine CBG’s data platform with KanKan to create a “comprehensive big data offering.”
“This has the potential to be a lot bigger because of the global reach of CBG’s business,” Tao told VEGAS INC on Monday. “We’ve acquired a company that has a direct and immediate footprint in China.”
CBG CEO Adam Roseman, who co-founded the branding group in 2012, called his company’s partnership with Remark “exciting.”
“We’ve been producing a lot of content for China that’s very valuable in other territories,” Roseman said. “We have a strong presence in high-value, primetime live content, and we’re looking forward to taking that to a deeper level."