Multilingual e-commerce content provider, Quill, will be completely integrated into Jellyfish. Quill is one of five companies being folded into the London-based digital marketing agency, according to a February 23, 2021 announcement on the Jellyfish website.
Ed Bussey, Founder and CEO of Quill, has joined Jellyfish as Chief Solutions Officer for Performance Content. Bussey told Slator, “The entire leadership team will be joining Jellyfish. The commercial details of the merger remain confidential [and] exact timelines for the full integration are yet to be confirmed.”
Both Quill and Jellyfish belong to French holding company, Fimalac (Euronext: FIM). In 2013, Fimalac acquired a majority stake in Webedia and, in November 2019, Jellyfish. Webedia then acquired Quill in May 2019. And now Quill will merge with Jellyfish to become its e-commerce content creation division.
“To give an indication of scale, Jellyfish was valued at GBP 500m when it received Fimalac’s investment in 2019. Following the acquisitions announced on February 23, Jellyfish has more than 2,000 employees in 40 offices [in] 20 countries.”
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Bussey added, “Rob Pierre, who founded Jellyfish in 2005 and continues as CEO, has led the company to an average 45% annual growth over the past eight years.”
Quill’s 250-strong client portfolio (e.g., eBay, Louis Vuitton, L’Occitane, M&S, etc.) spans 13 countries with content in over 50 languages. Prior to the merger, Quill had been delivering multilingual content solutions to Jellyfish and, of course, Webedia. However, Bussey told Slator, “the vast majority of our 250 clients, most of whom are leading e-commerce brands, precede our relationships with Fimalac and Jellyfish.”
Quill’s key focus has always been e-commerce — “companies generating a large proportion of their revenue online, either across multiple international markets or large product inventories — both of which require vast quantities of content, delivered at speed and scale,” Bussey said. As such, Quill typically operates in the Retail, Luxury Fashion, Beauty, Travel, Finance, and Education sectors.
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Quill’s content creation model includes a global network of 9,000 freelancers: native-speaking, subject-matter experts, who work in content creation, localization, and editing roles.
Asked how the deal will impact Quill in terms of deploying tech, Bussey replied, “Our tech stack is continually evolving as we embrace the latest innovations […] The merger won’t impact this approach, except to accelerate our roadmap, particularly the adoption of new technologies as they become available, with the backing of Jellyfish’s extensive global resources and technological capabilities.”
Bussey said Quill’s content production and localization projects are centrally managed via the proprietary platform, Quill Cloud. The platform automates production workflows and quality control so “human talent [can] focus on high-value tasks.”
According to Bussey, applying humans in the loop (a.k.a. PEMT), albeit “sparingly, only for specific types of content, and always in conjunction with human creativity and a layer of human editing” has allowed them to “pass on savings to our clients, while ensuring their content always drives e-commerce metrics.”
So will the merger change anything for Quill and Jellyfish’s external clients?
“In most respects, nothing changes. Our clients’ account teams, SLAs, and how we work will remain just as they are today. The only difference for Quill’s clients is that we’ll be backed by Jellyfish’s extensive resources. Similarly, Jellyfish’s clients will be able to benefit from multi-language content creation and localization capabilities, scaling their activities internationally through a single digital partner,” Bussey said.
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