Keywords Studios buys London marketing agency Maverick Media for £3.6m

Dublin headquartered video games specialist Keywords Studios has acquired creative marketing agency Maverick Media in a deal worth up to £3.6 million (€4 million).

The technical and creative services provider is scooping up the agency in a bid to broaden its range of marketing services.

The company will pay £2.7 million through a mixture of £2.4 million in cash and the remainder in shares, with the remaining consideration of up to £900,000 based on meeting performance targets over the first six months once the deal has completed.

Founded in 1995, London-based Maverick is one of the longest established video-game creative agencies in Europe. It employs 16 people, and produces marketing campaigns and related services for some of the world's leading games publishers, developers and brands.

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In the year to May 31st, 2020, Maverick generated revenues of more than £3.4 million and adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of approximately £1 million and has continued to grow despite the challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic.

"Maverick is a strong brand with a 25-year body of work in servicing video games publishers and developers and has grown successfully with the industry. We are excited about the expertise that Maverick will bring to our wider marketing business and ultimately to our client base across the group," said Andrew Day, chief executive of Keywords Studios.

“This is the second acquisition to complete following our recent £100 million placing and we have a healthy pipeline of further acquisition opportunities which we are reviewing and advancing.”

Acquisitions

London-listed Keywords is pursuing a strategy to become the “go to” technical and creative services platform for the global video games industry.

The company has made a number of acquisitions in recent months, announcing on June it had bought game development engineering services provider Coconuts Lizard in a £2 million deal. In December 2019, it bought machine translation technology company Kantan, marketing services company Ichi and audio recording studio Syllabes.