Performance marketing agency Wpromote has acquired Giant Spoon, forming an over 700-person shop that brings strategy, creative, tech, media and performance marketing under one roof. The combined entity will operate as Wpromote x Giant Spoon.
By
Brian Bonilla
Giant Spoon, founded in 2013 and at roughly 100 employees before the deal, carved out a reputation for culturally resonant, high-profile work. That includes HBO’s “House of the Dragon” launch, for which the agency wrapped the Empire State Building with a life-size dragon, and Lucid Motors’ recent campaign starring Timothée Chalamet in a short action film.
Wpromote CEO Andrea Bendzick will lead the new organization, with Giant Spoon co-founders Jonathan Haber, Marc Simons and Trevor Guthrie joining the company’s executive leadership team and maintaining their current roles. Currently, Haber oversees creative and strategy; Simons oversees experiential; and Guthrie oversees media.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Why the move makes sense
Giant Spoon’s business is split fairly evenly across creative, media and strategy, each representing roughly a third of the business, Haber said. While the agency has built out those capabilities, Haber said there was an increasing need from clients to track the business impact of big creative ideas.
Clients don’t differentiate the big idea from what delivers, and a lot of times they have to achieve both efforts by working with separate agencies, which makes the process “clunky and messy,” Haber said.
For Wpromote, which was named Ad Age’s 2025 Performance Agency of the Year, the acquisition stemmed from the need to pair stronger creative and brand strategy with its tech and data platform Polaris IQ, an AI intelligence platform that helps inform media strategies and customer insights. This is especially important because even lower-funnel work today requires more sophisticated brand storytelling, said Bendzick.
That’s why Wpromote didn’t want to acquire a purely creative shop, said Chief Strategy Officer Mike Stone, who helped initiate the deal. “Creative was certainly a big piece of it, but I want to be really clear that Giant Spoon is not just a creative shop,” Stone said. “It’s about the strategy that they’re bringing forward at the highest level from a brand perspective.”
For Giant Spoon’s part, “We’re really excited to get under the hood and see how [Polaris IQ] affects our strategic and creative process as well as asset creation for larger 360 campaigns,” Haber said.
Wpromote manages more than $3 billion in media spend for clients including Peacock, Intuit QuickBooks, Vuori and TransUnion. Some of Giant Spoon’s biggest clients include HBO, Lucid Motors, Walmart and Google. Giant Spoon also won the creative agency of record business for Autodesk this year.
Keeping both brands alive
Wpromote now owns 100% of Giant Spoon, and the combined company will operate as a single P&L while maintaining both agency brands in a combined name. According to Giant Spoon’s 2024 entry for the Ad Age A-List, the shop projected $36 million in revenue for that year.
“By retiring either of those brands we’re losing the greatness of what’s already there,” Bendzick said. “We felt we could come out even stronger by holding both.”
To promote the acquisition, the agencies are rolling out a joint “Love and Money” campaign to run on social media with visuals and messaging that underscore the merger’s central promise of uniting creativity and performance.
The Wpromote–Giant Spoon tie-up arrives amid a flurry of consolidation among independent agencies looking to bulk up capabilities without joining a holding company.
Last year, Barkley and OKRP merged to form BarkleyOKRP; Empower and Ocean Media combined to create Empower Ocean Media Group and Joan Creative and Crossmedia formalized a creative and media partnership to offer clients a more integrated model.
At the large-network level, Horizon Media and Havas Media struck a joint venture called Horizon Global earlier this year that’s designed to serve U.S.-anchored brands with global media needs.
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