The owner of Rimmel has made an unusual foray into the world of digital marketing after acquiring a British business set up by one of the architects of the BBC iPlayer.
Coty, which is on the cusp of closing a $15 billion deal to buy Procter & Gamble’s beauty brands including Max Factor and Wella shampoo, has made a side step to buy Beamly which describes itself as a social network specifically for television. It has not divulged the sale price but it is not believed to be a substantial amount.
Beamly, previously known as Zeebox, was set up by Anthony Rose who is credited with turning the BBC iPlayer from a hard-to-use technical product into one of the most successful streaming platforms. He teamed up with Ernesto Schmitt, a former EMI president, and hired developers from the BBC to work on a product designed to be a “second screen” TV service. The British business rebranded itself as Beamly to shed its reputation as a TV guide for geeks.
Sky has a 7 per cent stake in the business which it acquired in 2012 for less than $4 million. The satellite broadcaster used some of the Beamly technology in its own apps and services.
The UK business made a splash at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest when it said that 9 million people voted in one of its polls around the event. That compared with 6 million messages on Twitter. .
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That sort of traffic may have attracted buyers in the advertising sector rather than a cosmetics company. Coty, which is chaired by Bart Becht, the former Reckitt Benckiser chief executive, has pounced in a rare example of a brand taking over a technology platform. Tesco’s acquisition of BlinkBox, the digital movie and music streaming company, was a high profile example of a failure in that realm.
“The acquisition of Beamly will address the accelerating consumer shift in time spent from traditional media to real time digital and social media channels. Further, Beamly will help us to accelerate the growth of our e-commerce business,” said Camillo Pane, head of Category Development at Coty.