Dentsu Aegis Network Acquires E-Nor, Beefing Up Google Marketing Platform Expertise

Dentsu Aegis Network said Tuesday it has acquired E-Nor, a California-based consulting firm that specializes in Google Analytics and is a major reseller and sales and service partner of Google Marketing Platform.

E-Nor and its roughly 45 employees will fold into Cardinal Path, the marketing and analytics consulting group Dentsu acquired in 2016. Cardinal Path will take on E-Nor’s clients, which include Salesforce, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Accenture and the US Government. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With E-Nor, Cardinal Path is now the world’s largest sales and service partner of Google Analytics 360, which is part of the Google Marketing Platform. Similar to its strategy with DoubleClick, Google outsources sales, implementation and optimization for Google Marketing Platform to agencies and consulting firms with expertise.

“The implementation of these stacks is really complicated,” said Corey Koberg, co-CEO at Cardinal Path. “If you get it wrong, the failure can be catastrophic for clients.”

While Cardinal Path already had expertise with Google’s stack, adding the E-Nor team will bolster those capabilities at a time when clients are looking for privacy-safe solutions built on first-party data. Cardinal Path helps clients pull data from Google Analytics into Ads Data Hub and BigQuery, for example, where they can run models on their campaigns to drive better results in a privacy-safe way, which is critical with California Consumer Privacy Act enforcement beginning in mid-2020.

“The fines enabled in this legislation can put companies right out of business,” Koberg said. “We help them avoid those pitfalls.”

E-Nor also has expertise in tying together solutions from different mar tech providers to solve client-specific business problems. E-Nor has particularly strong integrations with Salesforce, one of its Google Analytics clients. That’s a big plus for Dentsu as more clients rely on CRM data to power their marketing activities.

“We’re seeing more value for our clients in the Salesforce implementation, and they have a head start on that,” Koberg said.

Cardinal Path and E-Nor don’t work exclusively with Dentsu clients, but the cross-sell opportunity is strong as clients increasingly need to integrate multiple systems to run cross-channel marketing activities. Being that systems integrator and implementor is a big opportunity for Dentsu to continue expanding its remit into consulting as the traditional agency business remains under pressure.

“Delivering personalized, engaging user experiences at scale is only possible with state-of-the-art mar tech platforms,” Koberg said. “Those are complex to manage and maintain.”