Just a few weeks ago, West Hartford-bound Seven Stars Cloud struck a three-year, $24 billion deal with the largest full-service operator for electric buses. Shortly after that, the company announced that it is planning to change its name to Ideanomics.
Now, the company has made an acquisition.
The global fintech and asset digitization services company announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Grapevine Logic Inc., an end-to-end influencer marketing platform that will play a pivotal role in SSC’s consumer asset digitization strategy.
This acquisition is integrally linked with SSC’s strategy to drive growth across its core product areas, which are fixed income-based financial digital assets, consumer tech digital assets and commodity and energy digital assets and tradetech digital assets.
“We are very excited to welcome Grapevine and its robust and vibrant network of influencers and brands to the SSC family,” Bruno Wu, executive chairman and CEO of SSC, said in a statement. “We believe Grapevine’s existing global ecosystem will be the foundation for a broad application of blockchain technologies throughout the media and entertainment industry and be the cornerstone of our consumer digital asset business line.”
Targeting the social media influencer market, which is estimated to have reached a market size of $2 billion in 2017, Grapevine has become a world leader in facilitating the collaboration between advertisers, brands and video-based social influencers and content creators.
Through the Grapevine platform, more than 4,700 brands have been able to engage with over 177,000 social influencers, reaching more than 3.2 billion followers, ultimately helping these companies promote their products and strengthen their brands.
Grapevine’s core business model thrives on brands spending their marketing dollars on Grapevine’s web-based platform. These brands essentially hire social media influencers to deliver specific marketing requirements.
Through bookings, Grapevine captures fees from brands as well as a service fee from hired influencers. Additionally, Grapevine provides a white glove agency model where the company works closely with big brands to deliver high quality marketing results with leading influencers.
Blockchain and artificial intelligence technology, core assets for SSC, enable seamless and decentralized collaboration between counterparties, eliminating the need for a central authority. Blockchain can be used for a wide variety of applications, such as tracking the ownership of digital assets, keeping decentralized transactional records and establishing verified consensus.
By applying blockchain-enabled technologies such as smart contracts and the tokenization of assets to Grapevine’s existing ecosystem and existing social media influencer business model, SSC looks to revolutionize the way influencers and celebrities alike, engage with fans, brands and communities on a global scale.
By empowering influencers via a token-based model, they will be able to more effectively build their brands, monetize their work and engage with their audiences. The ability to provide influencers with new monetization paths, as well as fans and brands with exclusive access to these influencers and their services, is a massive opportunity.
Additionally, the acquisition of Grapevine allows for unique access to high impact influencers from top celebrities through micro-influencers. SSC will be pursuing celebrity tokenization opportunities that may include and facilitate access to merchandise, exclusive interactions, and other value added services as influencers grow in popularity. With Grapevine, tokenized celebrity influencer monetization opportunities can be taken to new heights.
Further, Grapevine will accelerate SSC’s penetration into customer loyalty programs, consumer financing, and the asset securitization market. The combination of loyalty management programs and blockchain technology can bring immense efficiencies to cash rewards, pre-paid cards and coupons bringing numerous market efficiencies, cost reductions, and enhanced brand loyalty. In the U.S. alone, customer loyalty memberships have reached 3.8 billion.
“Our goal from day one was to help social influencers unlock value through brand collaborations while staying true to their audiences,” Grant Deken, co-founder and CEO of Grapevine, said in a statement. “Joining Bruno and the rest of the talented team at SSC accelerates our ability to innovate and provide new ways to create value and empower influencers, celebrities, and advertisers to more deeply connect and engage with audiences.”
