Singapore's Motion buys TRIAD to join digital storytelling and physical experience

Motion: For Impact, the Singapore-based experiential and sensory design agency, has acquired TRIAD, a Singapore creative agency specialising in content strategy and digital communications. Terms were not disclosed. The deal was reported by Marketing-Interactive.

Motion was founded more than 22 years ago by CEO Juliana Mattar and works across Singapore, Asia Pacific and the Middle East, with practices in content and communications, events and spaces, and people and culture. Its Motion Sensory consultancy covers Singapore, APAC and the Gulf. (Not to be confused with Chicago's Motion Agency, which has been making acquisitions of its own this year.)

TRIAD is led by founder and managing director Selene Chin, who brings close to three decades of experience in content strategy and digital communications. The agency has worked with FMCG, B2B and technology clients, mostly on digital work, with physical activations and trade events a smaller part of what it does.

TRIAD's creative direction, art direction and senior content strategy teams move into Motion's practice. Both agencies' existing clients, across aviation, tourism, hospitality, finance, FMCG and technology, will be served by the combined team straight away.

Why this deal makes sense

This is two halves of the same brief coming together. Motion builds physical and sensory experiences. TRIAD tells the story online. Clients increasingly want both joined up, so the campaign that runs on social matches the experience people walk into.

Chin made the point directly: Motion's whole practice is built around physical, sensory experiences, and TRIAD's digital narrative skills slot alongside it under one roof. For Mattar, the deal is about range rather than size. "We're not simply becoming bigger; we are becoming more complete," she said. It also gives Motion more creative capacity as it pushes further into Asia and the Middle East.

What founders can learn from this

Some of the best fits are not competitors but neighbours: agencies that work on the same clients, just at a different point in the journey. TRIAD did not need to become an experiential agency to be valuable to one. It needed to be very good at the piece Motion did not have.

If you run a specialist shop, map out who sits next to you on your clients' work. The agency that hands off to you, or picks up after you, may well be your most natural buyer, because you make their offer complete.

Want to know which buyers would value your agency most? Talk to Agencies.co.

Source: Marketing-Interactive