SAMY Buys Get Engaged for $100M+ // The Music Rolodex Premium

–SELLER: Get Engaged–

Overview

• Social-first marketing agency working across creators, talent, entertainment and culture
• Founded by Alex Dermer, Cam Fordham and Ben Hiott
• Offices in Atlanta, New York, Nashville, Los Angeles
• Acquired by SAMY, closed Sept 30, 2026
• 120+ FT staff, ~70 in Atlanta
• Founded 2016

Company Highlights

• Revenue grew 40% YoY per Fordham
• 500+ music campaigns run as of Billboard’s profile in the early 2020s
• Network of dozens of celebrities and 2,500+ influencers, same era
• Brand clients incl Sephora, DoorDash, Raising Cane’s, Live Nation, NBCUniversal, EA Games, Sazerac, Universal Music Group and Perplexity
• Earlier roster incl MLS, the PGA Tour, Kendra Scott and Atlanta United
• Music clients incl Marshmello, Megan Thee Stallion, Blink-182, Khalid, Big Sean and Steve Aoki
• Super Bowl-week campaign work incl DoorDash with 50 Cent and Carl’s Jr. with Alix Earle

Founding Story

• Dermer, Fordham and Hiott started the biz in 2016 out of Atlanta Tech Village
• Started with artist services for Atlanta hip-hop artists…meet-and-greets and tour merchandise for acts incl Waka Flocka Flame and T.I.
• Formal music division came in 2018, two years later, which catalyzed growth of the larger agency.
• Highlights of early music work include The Weeknd’s After Hours rollout, the “Blinding Lights” TikTok challenge, PARTYNEXTDOOR’s “Believe It” with Rihanna, Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage”
• Fordham points to the pandemic as a key inflection point, when brands pulled budget from traditional media and pushed it onto TikTok
• Explains how a marketing agency that started booking rapper appearances ended up running Super Bowl week for DoorDash

Business Model & Services

• Influencer marketing…
• Brand campaigns across the creator network. Billboard reported $10K to $100K per campaign in the early 2020s, running a week to several months, with some labels and artists on monthly retainers. Current fee model not disclosed.
• Celebrity partnerships…
• Direct talent deals for brands, incl work for labels, studios and live entertainment clients like Live Nation, NBCUniversal and Universal Music Group. Hiott’s pitch is that a brand can reach a big name without routing through a major agency. 
• Social media management and community management…
• Always-on channel operations for brands. 
• Creative services and production…
• In-house content production. 
• Paid media…
• Media planning and buying.
• Content monetization and venture…
• Both listed on Get Engaged’s website services page. I don’t know details.

Owners & Selling Shareholders

• Founder-owned ahead of the transaction, with no disclosed outside institutional capital
• Dermer, Fordham and Hiott each retain what Dermer calls “meaningful ownership in the combined business”

Financials

Not disclosed. Get Engaged is private, and neither side released revenue nor EBITDA data. My guess based on the reported low 9 figures exit, 120 person team size, and avg industry valuation multiples, is that EBITDA is in the low 8 figures.

Select Capital Markets History

• Sept 30, 2026: Acquired by SAMY for a reported low nine figures in cash and equity, founders retaining ownership in the combined biz

–BUYER: SAMY–

Overview

• Social-first marketing network, HQ in Madrid
• Founded 2012 by Juan Andres Elhazaz, Patricia Ratia and Marta Nicolás
• Majority owned by PE firm Bridgepoint since Q1 2025
• Network of 600 partners and 10 acquired agencies
• ~1,200 FT staff across 22 offices
• Operating in 55+ markets

Company Highlights

• €100M revenue in 2024, hitting its stated annual target
• Grew from 600+ staff in early 2025 to 1,200 today
• 75% of revenue comes from outside its home market
• Clients incl L’Oréal, Unilever, Diageo, Microsoft, Red Bull, The North Face, Barilla and Grindr
• 2026 account wins incl Unilever’s Foods biz, Barilla’s global influencer remit, and an expanded European scope for The North Face

Founding Story

• Founded 2012 in Madrid as a social media agency, then grew into a group of separately branded agencies under one parent
• Grew geographically by acquisition rather than organic build
• Aurica Capital was main shareholder through the growth phase, with Inveready and Sabadell Venture Capital holding minority positions
• Bridgepoint took a minority stake in Aug 2023, then bought out Aurica, Inveready and Sabadell for majority control in early 2025
• Had US-based teams well before this deal, via Nobox in Miami (2022) and Content Lab in Irvine (2025). Those agencies primarily served LATAM and Asian clients, respectively, so a deeper bench of US brand-marketer relationships remained the open opportunity

Business Model & Services

• Influencer and creator marketing…
• Campaign work across 55+ markets, and the majority of group revenue
• Data, research and insights…
• Market data and campaign measurement
• Strategy and creative…
• Brand strategy, creative management and content production
• PR and communications…
• Earned media and comms work alongside the paid and social offering
• Social commerce…
• Commerce-led social campaign work
• Paid media…
• Planning and buying across markets
• Product and technology development…
• Build work for client-side platforms

Owner

• Bridgepoint, the London-listed PE firm. Héctor Pérez, Deputy Managing Partner of Bridgepoint Europe, is key point
• First invested $6M for 12.75% in Aug 2023
• Took majority control in early 2025. Iberian Lawyer reported ~€300M enterprise value, though Bridgepoint has never disclosed terms

Select Capital Markets History

• 2020: Acquires Share Creative (UK)
• 2022: Acquires Nobox Marketing (Miami)
• Aug 2023: Bridgepoint acquires minority stake alongside Aurica Capital
• 2024: Acquires Kurio (Helsinki) and MDS (Bogotá)
• Jan 2025: Acquires Content Lab (Irvine, CA) (our analysis)
• Feb 2025: Bridgepoint agrees majority control, buying out Aurica, Inveready and Sabadell. Closes Q1 2025
• Apr 2025: Acquires Intermate (Germany)
• Oct 2025: Acquires team5pm (Amsterdam)
• Oct 2026: Acquires Get Engaged (US)

–DEAL DETAILS–

Overview

• Closed Sep 30, 2026, then publicly announced Oct 6
• Reported low nine figures enterprise value
• Paid in cash and equity
• Founders retain “meaningful ownership in the combined business”
• All three founders stay. Dermer becomes CEO
• Get Engaged keeps its name and becomes SAMY’s US arm, with Atlanta as home base
• Our understanding is a relationship was built over time, then a formal banker process was run
• No layoffs announced

Strategic Rationale

Buyer (SAMY):

• Buys a US roster of celebrity and entertainment relationships it had no realistic way to build from Madrid
• Gets a 120-person US operating base with Atlanta, New York, Nashville and LA
• Deepens US brand-marketer relationships, which prior US acquisitions hadn’t fully delivered
• Adds American brand relationships to a client roster that was weighted to Europe and LATAM
• Per press release: “talent, creators and local-market expertise”
• Elhazaz: “Get Engaged is the ideal partner to lead that expansion”

Seller (Get Engaged):

• Gets campaign activation across Europe, Asia and LATAM for a client base that was primarily US
• Adds more production resources into the Get Engaged platform
• Gets data, measurement and product capability
• Keeps the name, the leadership and the Atlanta HQ
• Takes partial liquidity after ten years bootstrapped, while incentivized via a 2nd potential liquidity
• Dermer: “We built Get Engaged to help brands connect with culture”

Post-Deal Operations

• Dermer remains CEO. Fordham and Hiott continue in the business
• No announced headcount reduction

–WHAT ELSE I FIND INTERESTING–

Music is the training ground for modern creator agencies

We’re increasingly seeing creator marketing and management companies emerge from music origins. There are key reasons why.

Get Engaged started in 2016 providing artist services for Atlanta hip-hop. That included meet-and-greets and tour merchandise for acts incl Waka Flocka Flame and T.I. Then in 2018 the company stood up a formal music division. According to Billboard, they’ve run 500+ music campaigns with a network of dozens of celebrities and 2,500+ influencers. Those relationships are now productized as Celebrity Partnerships, and is a key part of SAMY’s strategic rationale for the deal.

This is a trend we’re increasingly seeing in the space.

Zach Katz was a music attorney, co-founded Beluga Heights with JR Rotem, and ran BMG’s US business before co-founding Fixated (backed by Eldridge) to build a modern creator management and services business (our analysis of their acquisitions of Ellify and Elevate). Chaotic Good started clipping content for musicians and has expanded into lifestyle and entertainment marketing. Clementine Group began with label marketing services on TikTok and pushed into broader creator management and marketing across multiple categories. 1916 manages, publishes and distributes across a roster of producers, writers and composers, and is increasingly building and investing across entertainment including creators.

And this is just a sample from my knowledge and relationships across the creator industry. 

Four of the companies our team is working with this year have origin stories that span being a music label executive, music artist management, and label marketing services before building a broader creator marketing and / or management businesses.

Here’s why I believe this throughline exists. 

Music is where you learn to spot a cultural moment before it’s a moment. You work with artists, so you build representation and talent management chops. You work with the brands activating around those artists, so you learn the marketer buyside too. You get live and experiential, which matters more every year in brand marketing. And you spend your days activating on social, where music-related content consistently outperforms. Put those together and it’s a strong training ground for anyone building a modern creator agency.

Here’s the key takeaway. 

Influencer marketing is saturated, and good creative is what makes a campaign rise above the noise. Get Engaged runs its own creative and content production team so the work it does with celebs and influencers stands out, and I believe the music roots help there. We see the same dynamic in a couple creator marketing clients of ours that pair social creative with IM and paid media, because the creative is what drives performance. Further, we just sold a creative social and creator marketing agency to a private equity buyer (announcement coming soon), where buyers were excited by the creative instinct. The deal market agrees…Wpromote bought Giant Spoon to put creative and experiential behind its performance media (our deal analysis), and Accenture Song bought Superdigital, a social-first creative shop, to fill a gap in Droga5 (our analysis), before going on to buy Whalar for scaled creator reach (our analysis).

So if you’re adding creator capabilities, whether that’s buying, hiring, or partnering…look hard at the founders who came up in music. I bet we keep seeing more of them in deal flow.

Rolled equity, and the long road to liquidity

Deal structure is something we spend a lot of time helping clients understand.

Dermer noted the founders keep “meaningful ownership in the combined business.” My interpretation is they rolled their equity into the holdco rather than retaining a stake just in Get Engaged.

They didn’t disclose how much. For a majority sale where a minority stake is rolled into the buyer’s holdco, what we typically see is somewhere between 60/40 and 80/20. There are exceptions, but that’s where we see most deals tend to land.

For this type of deal structure, the balance you’re solving for is the following…

Founders want real money off the table for what they’ve built, which de-risks them after years of everything they own sitting in one asset. Buyers want the founders and key leadership incented to keep building post sale. This is critical in an agency or services business, because the founders and the leadership team are often a key part of the business and hold many of the top client relationships, unless they’ve built a scaled operation. That means that if the founders and top leaders check out post close, so does the value of the business.

Rolled equity is how you solve for both at once.

A holdco stake can be a more interesting thing to own than a stake in your own company. You’re no longer just growing your own P&L at whatever clip you were growing it. Say a Get Engaged client has only ever bought influencer campaigns. Now there’s paid media across 55 markets to put behind it, a data team to better target a larger audience, and a social commerce layer to drive conversion for a marketer client. Conversely, a European SAMY client gets access to US celebrity talent it couldn’t reach before the deal. That’s the cross-sell opportunity, and it only works if the teams actually collaborate on the client account.

If you help grow the holdco’s financial performance, you also help grow holdco enterprise value. And now you own a piece of that.

Every deal is custom here, and this is the part advisors and corp dev teams spend time on when they’re planning the post merger integration (PMI), which is a key part of these deals. How do you measure success after close? How do you set incentives so people coordinate instead of protecting their own workstream, while still tracking whatever an earnout is tied to?

No single document or contract solves all of this. However you structure these, there’s a level of trust baked in between the buyer and seller…you can only contract so much.

Which is why the design and management of the M&A sales process is important. The conversations, the time spent, the relationship built ideally before any formal auction or banker gets involved (though if no prior relationship, rapport building can be done mid process if the advisor is not overly obstructionist). My understanding is these two teams knew each other before the M&A auction process started.

And you learn a lot sitting across from someone. How they talk about the growth plan. How they negotiate. Whether they stay collaborative when something gets hard in contracting. That’s a real signal on whether a seller is leaned in for the next few years post deal.

Which brings me to the question I’d want answered if I were the Get Engaged founders… 

What’s the path to liquidity on the rolled stake?

Bridgepoint took majority control in Q1 2025 and is early in its hold period. The average private equity hold is five to seven years, so call it 2029 to 2031. But what if they hold longer? What if the market turns and they don’t sell over the next ten years?

These founders used to control their own outcome completely. Run the P&L how they wanted, take EBITDA distributions when they wanted, they had full control. That’s gone now.

On a retained stake at the seller, you’d usually negotiate a put/call, so there’s a defined way to get liquidity on 100% of your business. On a rolled holdco stake it’s harder, because you’re a minority holder in the parent. So what you negotiate for instead is tag-along and drag-along rights, information rights, and the right to participate if there’s a secondary or any liquidity event at the holdco level.

I don’t know what’s in this specific deal. But those are the terms our team would fight for.

The insight here is that the headline number doesn’t tell you what these founders actually got, nor what they’ll get in the future. We’ve written about this before. LADbible and Uncovered (our analysis), where the sellers kept a stake but had no rights to profit distributions. Acast and Backyard Ventures (our analysis). In both of these deals, the structure was a critical component.

So if you’re thinking about selling, bring these points up early in the LOI negotiation before going into exclusivity e.g. how much comes out in cash versus what rolls… and if it rolls, what’s your actual path to getting future liquidity. Those are the questions I’d want answered before signing anything.

Food over-indexes in creator marketing, and both buyer & seller have strong books of business here

Food is one of the most active categories in creator and social M&A. It’s worth understanding why.

Food content outperforms. It’s one of the formats the algorithm consistently rewards, and it shows up in a lot of cultural moments because food is part of everyone’s day.

Food content also converts. Food was one of the earliest content x commerce vehicles… you watch something, you want it, you buy it → food has strong impulse dynamics, which works well in social commerce. And it runs past commerce into paid content like recipes, memberships, and events like food festivals.

Then there’s the marketer side. Food manufacturers, retailers, restaurant chains and delivery platforms all spend heavily here, which means the agencies and publishers serving them have real budgets to work with.

We’ve covered this market a lot. The $83M Hot Ones sale (our analysis). Feedfeed’s sale to People Inc., where we were the sell-side advisors (our analysis). Mythical selling Sporked to Savage Ventures (our analysis).

This deal reflects similar dynamics. Get Engaged works with DoorDash, Raising Cane’s and Sazerac. Todd Graves, who founded Raising Cane’s, even gave a quote in the deal release…not a normal thing for a client to do in an agency sale.

And SAMY just won Unilever’s Foods business in March. So food is a focus on both sides of this transaction, and growing the food marketer portfolio and AOV through cross-selling services is likely a priority post close.

Europe keeps landing in the non-coastal US

This is the fifth deal we’ve covered in two years, and there are likely more.

• Croud (London) buys Vert Digital (Atlanta), Jun 2024 (our analysis)
• SAMY (Madrid) buys Content Lab (Irvine, CA), Jan 2025 (our analysis)
• Miroma (London) buys Ad Results Media (Houston), Jul 2026 (our analysis)
• Acast (Stockholm) buys Backyard Ventures (Austin), Aug 2026 (our analysis)
• SAMY (Madrid) buys Get Engaged (Atlanta), Oct 2026

Three things are going on here.

First, European buyers want into the US. They’re buying US-based teams and the US marketer and talent relationships that come with them. That’s slow to build from abroad and much faster to acquire.

Second, a lot of this activity is happening outside NYC and LA, in hubs across the South and the West. You’re not paying the tier one city premium, but you’re still getting a top performing agency. That’s the arbitrage opportunity. 70 of Get Engaged’s 120 staff sit in Atlanta. We see it in our own client book as well…one of our creator marketing clients runs its main office out of the Midwest, with satellite offices in the bigger cities.

Third, which is specific to SAMY. They’ve bought US-based businesses before. Nobox in Miami, Content Lab in Irvine. But those teams primarily serve LATAM and Asian clients. What SAMY didn’t have was a US business serving US marketers. Hence the Get Engaged deal.

Nashville is the city I’d watch next…Get Engaged has an office there, VidCon moves there under LIONS in 2027, CAA just opened a new office there in July, and there are multiple creator companies scaling there.