2024 State of the Union for Creator x Media Advisory
RockWater Roundup
It’s time to celebrate some wins, recap our 2024 client advisory work, and preview our 2025 growth plans for RockWater.
There’s a lot below, so here’s the exec sum:
- Growth of our capital markets advisory and related projects
- Continued corporate strategy / FP&A / BD advisory and related projects
- New 2025 service offering for digital and talent agencies
- Conviction around social-native CPG and our search fund
- New RockWater team member and planned new hires
- Growth of our events business, including what’s in store for 2025
- Planned editorial expansion to fill the gap in M&A and dealmaking analysis
- Looking forward to a strong close and Q4 sprint
Alright, let’s get to it.
Onward,
Chris, founder of RockWater
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Capital Markets Advisory
2024 has been an incredible year for our capital markets advisory.
Over the last couple years we ramped up our M&A advisory services for digital media and agency founders seeking to sell their business, and the product-market fit has been stellar. We’ve also been engaged by private equity firms to assess investment opportunities across digital media and marketing agencies. Further, we’ve been selectively working with founders to raise capital, and we’ve had some wins despite a challenging fundraising market.
Overall, there’s an increasing amount of deal activity and capital markets planning from both buyers and sellers, and we’re seeing strong signals that dealmaking activity will pick up in 2025.
Here’s a few highlights:
Completed RockWater Projects
- Sold Long Haul Management, one of the largest remaining independent sports x gaming influencer management companies, to Wasserman, a global sports, music, and entertainment company. A landmark Hollywood M&A transaction (blog post about deal)
- Sold Bounty to gen.video, a transaction that enables the integration of influencer marketing technology into a one-of-a-kind product offering for brands and marketers (blog post about deal).
- Supported the capital raise of an 8-figure Series A from a family office for a digital content studio producing original IP and branded content.
- Obtained 7-figure follow on investment for a SaaS start up from existing investors.
- Diligenced the acquisition of a content catalog for a media and FAST channel network. Advised against acquisition because valuation expectations were not aligned to market.
- Prepared a digital talent agency for acquisition and merger discussions. Advised to wait until next year for go-to market.
- Recruited private equity sponsors for the 9 figure merger of two specialized media agencies (deal not completed)
- Developed acquisition strategy for celebrity-led media brand that’s transitioning into digital.
Ongoing RockWater Projects
- Brought a portfolio of YouTube channels to market; currently under exclusivity with a buyer.
- Diligenced the acquisition of a diversified post-production house for a prestigious content studio. Acquisition discussions remain underway
- Formulating acquisition strategy for a leading ad tech conglomerate.
- Advising the founder of a digital talent representation firm on acquisition discussions with a strategic buyer.
- Advising a diversified marketing agency on sell-side M&A discussions with a short-list of strategic partners.
- Raising the Series A for a social-native pet products brand.
- Creating go-to-market and fundraise strategy for a digital agency rollup.
- Diligenced hundreds of podcast acquisition targets for DWNLOAD Media. Determined there’s still a large bid-ask spread between buyers and sellers, so dealmaking is on hold until seller expectations align to current market reality and we’re comfortable with deal ROI and risk profiles. Our conviction for the audio industry investment remains high.
We truly enjoy this work because we help to influence the creator x media landscape for the better, and sometimes, our work meaningfully changes the lives of our clients.
Here’s two recent client testimonials:
“RockWater crushed it for me, and I’m thrilled with the successful outcome. The sale of Long Haul was a life-changing event for me, my team, and my clients.
There were a countless number of curveballs that were thrown at us during the process and RockWater helped me navigate them excellently. I’m very grateful to Chris and his team for their hard work and dealmaking smarts throughout the sales process, and can not speak highly enough of them.”
-Dan Levitt, Founder and CEO of Long Haul Management (sold to Wasserman)
“After trying to sell Bounty in the past, I hired RockWater to expedite the process and ensure a favorable outcome. RockWater definitely delivered on that promise – they activated their network to create a lot of buzz for Bounty, pushed initial conversations along from interest → intent → offers , and were instrumental in getting the deal across the finish line.
There were lots of ups and downs in the sales process, and RockWater was incredibly helpful throughout. I’d recommend them as an m&a advisor to any founder selling their business.”
-Abe Wolke, CEO of Bounty (sold to gen.video)
Corporate Strategy / FP&A / Business Development
Budgets got leaner for big corporate strategy projects over the past couple years, but we’re seeing a resurgence in a need for strategy and research support, particularly with profitable or PE-backed companies.
The name of the game in 2024 remains “Profitability”. Most of our engagements are focused on restructuring a company to breakeven, or increasing the lead for those who are already profitable. In this economy, the rich are getting richer.
Completed RockWater Projects
- Formulated and implemented post merger integration and new growth plan for The Creator Society, a first-of-its-kind affiliate and talent management agency.
- Developed 2025 business plan for a portfolio of high-growth YouTube channels. Defined their licensing strategy, made M&A recommendations, and roadmapped product development.
- Built competitive landscape and market mapping for Gen AI content creation technology. Used to inform product roadmap and go-to-market.
- Constructed pricing strategy for merchandise drop, which sold out in minutes and generated 7 figures in revenue.
- Accelerated business development for Prism Labs, a leading health tracking and body scanning technology. Awesome to see their traction, including their new partnerships with Noom and FitnessAI.
- Assessed new growth opportunities for STIR Brands + Entertainment, a specialist influencer representation agency with marquee clients including The Try Guys. RockWater performed a rapid internal audit and conducted competitor analysis to see where Stir could build on its strengths and further differentiate itself.
- Devised sales plan for digital content localization software, led by a seasoned digital entrepreneur, to acquire more creators and publishers as customers.
- Advised on restructuring of a podcast production studio to improve margins, rally around its core business units, and pursue new 2025 growth initiatives.
- Advised a founder with two creator-focused businesses on how to define a new growth plan, reorg its team for improved performance, renegotiate key client partnerships, and improve cash management.
Ongoing RockWater Projects
- Built a globalization plan for an Asia-based eSports and digital marketing agency seeking to enter additional territories. Now identifying some capital markets opportunities.
- Serving as consigliere to FAST streaming network. Over multi-year relationship, helped them navigate from a low margin media business to meaningful profitability, and improved attractiveness to future buyers. Now focused on 2025 budgeting.
- Advising an up-and-coming digital management company focused on creators and athletes on growth planning, future budgeting, and how to best scale a lean org structure.
- Advising a YouTube-focused content studio, which focuses on low-budget but high-quality long form content, on growth and fundraise planning.
We consistently find new growth and improvement opportunities for our clients. The formula is simple. We…
- Provide fresh perspective via on our extensive knowledge of the space, which is based on daily executive and founder convos / research of revenue and capital flows / ongoing M&A advisory
- Unlock and refine ideas that are already sitting within leadership
- Help our clients focus on what matters most, which is challenging in a noisy marketplace.
To arrive at our growth recommendations, we roll up our sleeves and jump in the weeds with our clients. We love to learn (which we do quickly), which allows us to generate novel solutions and ideas…
“I’ve known RockWater for over a decade and after working with them I can confidently say that they are THE elite advisor within the creator economy.
They got deep into the trenches with our team during our merger, and gave us the help, insight and consult we needed to get through the merger and set up our company on a focused forward path. TCS is set up for tremendous success thanks to RockWater solidifying our foundation. It was great working with them and we are now starting a second phase with them for 2025 building on the foundation they helped build.”
-Larry Shapiro, CEO of The Creator Society
“RockWater provided me immeasurably valuable insights at a critical inflection point of my business.
They filtered out the noise and provided actionable recommendations that have been impactful to my business. Their team puts in the extra mile, still helping me long after the project has been completed and proactively making introductions to potential partners.”
-Ray Powell, CEO of Stir Brans + Entertainment
New 2025 Service Offerings
We’re seeing a common trend of poorly kept accounting records across digital agencies and talent businesses.
It’s not surprising… high volume of deals → large number of transactions x fractional accounting service providers = recipe for disaster. It also complicates things when agency and talent rep owners are ready to sell – it’s both costly and timely to do a multi-year accounting scrub in the middle of acquisition discussions.
There’s a better solution that RockWater can provide through a curated network of accounting service providers specially tailored to digital agency owners. We have a working history with these providers, and we can layer on our own FP&A services for a strong combined solution. The new service will ensure an agency’s books are clean, making cash management, talent and partner payments, and KPI reporting much easier. It also allows us to develop relationships with business owners long before they are ready to sell.
We’re testing this service with a few select clients before mass rollout. Based on learnings, our RockWater team may even invest in providing this service ourself someday, but we’re not there yet.
DM me if you’d be interested in learning more.
RockWater’s Stealth Investment Fund
Through all the market noise, we’re seeing strong signals about a few select opportunities to build billion-dollar companies. Our conviction is high, so we soft-launched an internal search fund over the summer, with the thesis to acquire and roll up social-native commerce companies with private equity backing. I’m being intentionally vague because the work is still underway.
We’ve already committed our own capital and are sourcing additional investors who can provide strategic support, ranging from CPG operational expertise, to access to key leadership and financing relationships.
DM me if you want to get involved.
Growing Our Team
One of our biggest challenges this year has been hiring to support our growing client roster. Finding the unique combination of technical skills with creator x media industry savvy has not been easy.
That said, we’ve been delighted to bring on a new full time analyst, Mehran Syed, who was promoted from our intern ranks. He’s a very strong addition to our team, and is already deep in our client advisory work. We also have a pipeline of candidates for future analyst and associate roles, which we expect to make an additional hire from as we ramp up some additional projects.
RockWater is also expanding its geographic coverage, with myself relocating to the east coast / NYC area in 2025, and our Director, Michael Booth, remaining in Los Angeles. RockWater’s footprint in key territories is growing.
As an aside, Michael Booth will be doing an extended roadshow meeting with creator economy executives in Latin America during Q4 this year. DM him if you’re in Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, or Santiago and would like to meet up → mike @ wearerockwater dot com
The Nexus of the Creator Economy
We’ve broken our record on RockWater live events this year.
- We’ve already hosted seven executive events, which breaks our previous record of four.
- Our Night Before VidCon Event was over 3x larger than last year, with 250+ attendees. We’re already gameplanning a 400 person event for 2025.
- We hosted our first VIP yacht cruise this September with the LOST iN team.
- We attended new conferences this year, like VidSummit and The Information’s Creator Economy Summit (we co-hosted a large exec event that night), where we met new industry friends.
- We’re planning an executive dinner in NYC in mid December with our industry friend Jeff Frommer, and his stealth newco. More details to come.
- We’ve got an event in the works for our first international event at The One Billion Follower Summit, upcoming this January in Dubai.
- We’re a strategic partner to SoCom, the first dedicated social commerce conference, February 6 2025 in LA. Sign up here to get an early bird discount. We’ll also co-host a Night Before party with The Creator Society, stay tuned for details
- We’ve developed new relationships with amazing service providers to the creator economy, who sponsor and thus subsidize our events for attendees. Shout out to Tipalti, Greenberg Glusker, Fundmates, Merrill Lynch, and Linguana.
What’s most important is that we’ve delivered wins for the community. We’ve heard of multiple new partnerships, hirings, investments, and more that were borne out of meeting at a RockWater event.
Building RockWater’s Brand Awareness
Our editorial cadence has been more consistent than ever this year.
We’ve gotten our M&A newsletter out every week, posted on Linkedin nearly every day, refined an M&A deal summary format that resonates with our audience, and professionalized our thumbnails. Content has always been something that we CAN do well, but doing it consistently well amongst the day-to-day client work has always been a challenge…though we remain steadfast, since our editorial adds tremendous value to our client work via data gathering, insights, and new executive relationships.
It’s also become more clear that there’s a void of quality M&A analysis for media, agency, and creator economy businesses, and we want to fill it. We may even begin to syndicate our content onto new platforms like Instagram and TikTok, stay tuned!
Our client work has also been featured in a countless number of publications this year. To name a few: Variety, Deadline, Bloomberg, GQ, The Hollywood Reporter, Sports Business Journal, Vulture, TheWrap, Tube Filter, Yahoo Finance, Hypebeast, Net Influencer, MSN, The Wrap, MarTech Cube, The Future Party, and The Information.
Here’s to Q4 🥂
We’re excited to close out the year with a bang – generating more wins for clients and our industry, growing our brand and editorial footprint, and laying a strong foundation for 2025.
If we haven’t spoken yet this year, then it’s a perfect time to reconnect. There are more opportunities than ever in creator x media, and we want to be speaking to all of the people building the next-gen businesses of tomorrow.
DM me on LinkedIn or at chris @ wearerockwater dot com
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I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do financial and strategy advisory for media, agencies, and creator economy. From M&A and fundraising to consumer research and go-to-market planning.
DM me on LinkedIn or email me chris @ wearerockwater dot com
