Sports and business consulting agency Elevate has announced the purchase of the brand consultancy arm of Fenway Sports Management, expanding its own brand consultancy offering.
With the purchase, Elevate Brand acquires Fenway Sports Management’s strong portfolio of brand partnerships including Moderna, Santander Bank, and the Red Sox Foundation.
Elevate already boasts a number of global brands as clients such as Duracell, conglomerate proctor & Gamble, and software company Globant.
The business firm has also partnered with a number of high-profile sports properties in the past, activating alongside motor racing’s F1, soccer’s Premier League and FIFA World Cup, and American football’s NFL among others in 2023 alone.
In order to support the growing team, Elevate will set up a new office in Boston, Massachusetts, home of Fenway and Elevate’s first office in the city.
Elevate chief executive and chair Al Guido, speaking to Sportcal (GlobalData Sport), said of the acquisition: “
“This business is all about people and Fenway has a tremendous reputation in the space. I have a ton of respect for [Fenway Sport Group chief executive] Sam Kennedy and all the folks that were there and then BriAnne [Newman] and her team that had been running the Fenway Sports Management Group for a while now.
He added: “This is just another evolution in the work that we've already been doing under Cameron's team. And you know, with this acquisition, we pick up a number of employees, but the best part of it is we pick up a number of clients as well.”
Other clients arriving at Elevate Brand through the purchase include Monster.com, Old Trapper, and FM Global.
Cameron Wagner, chief client officer at Elevate Brand, will remain in that role while BriAnne Newman, vice president of sponsorship consulting and events at Fenway Sports Management will become senior vice president of Elevate Brand.
Speaking to Sportcal (GlobalData Sport) Wagner said: “[Fenway] have an incredibly seasoned and experienced team who have a depth of expertise in this area so we'll tap into that immediately.
“We're excited about BriAnne joining our team. She's been at Fenway for 20-plus years. She understands the properties in which Fenway has had relationships with better than probably anybody else on our team, and that brings incredible knowledge to us.”
Wagner added that the Fenway acquisition bolsters Elevate Brand’s current operations while adding upwards scalability, stating: “As we're all seeing there is a consolidation in the agency space, especially in the brand consulting […] because brands prefer to work with less agencies that can do more.
“We have media consultancy now. We have one of the strongest data and insights platforms and applications of it in the industry. We excel in the negotiation space, and then we excel in the areas where you have to excel if you're going to be a strong agency for branding, that's partnership management, and activation.
“The acquisition of a Fenway Sports Management brand consulting group absolutely bolsters what we were already doing and amplifies it. They give us the opportunity to scale our business with the things we're already doing very quickly. And so that was one of the great appeals of working with them and addition to their client roster, and their experience bringing brands to live at properties and the live activation space which is an area which we're growing as well.
Fenway Sports Management is Elevate’s second high-profile acquisition in as many months.
In early February, Elevate purchased executive search company SRI, creating a new executive search and global talent advisory firm (Elevate Talent) off the back if it.
As well as growing Elevate’s resources in the talent search industry, as well as its client list, the purchase of SRI also adds to the agency’s work across brand consulting, strategy, creative, premium hospitality, audience measurement, marketing and revenue analytics, and data-driven insights.
