Arc’s Acquired Touchpoint for Its First-Party Data Marketing Expertise

Touchpoint Markets, the former business and finance division of legal publisher ALM, has a highly-developed approach to first-party data marketing. It’s one of the main reasons Arc Networks bought its fellow EagleTree-owned sister company. Touchpoint’s brands, meanwhile, will benefit from Arc’s expertise in throwing large events.

Touchpoint Markets Chief Executive Officer Matt Weiner said of his company: “You’re looking at an org that is rooted in marketing services, rooted in: how do you monetize first-party data? How do you enhance that data? How do you leverage intent and behavioral? And all of those things, both on and off brand, enhance your lead generation business.

“Those are all things that we’ve been focusing on for several years now at our core. And I think that Arc really sees the opportunity to enhance what they’re doing, as well, with some of the work we’ve done in marketing services.” 

Touchpoint told AMO last month that since it was spun out of ALM, the business has been focusing on mapping its users to specific revenue outcomes, assisted by a “pretty sophisticated” audience segmenting approach and an advanced advertising product based on audience intent data. If, for example, employees at a given company who are registered in Touchpoint’s ecosystem begin searching for a customer relationship management solution, Touchpoint can spin up a custom marketing campaign to capitalize on that interest.

First-party data is core to the success of modern media companies. When Google announced that Chrome was deprioritizing the third-party cookie—and publishers got burnt outsourcing their audience relationship to other platforms—operators began building up a detailed understanding of their readers which can be used to tailor better, more valuable ads, create more useful leads for clients and run events that are better suited to reader needs.

It’s All About Community

Arc Networks has verticals including food and agriculture, financial services, HR and education, focused on the U.S. and Europe. Touchpoint publishes brands including Credit Union Times, Treasury&Risk and financial advisor news service ThinkAdvisor.

Tim Hart, Arc’s President in the Americas, said the verticals covered all have audiences with “very rich information needs.”

“Arc, at its heart, is a community business,” he said. “What we do is we connect people to people, people to information and people to solutions.” Hart declined to elaborate on the terms of the acquisition.

Weiner echoed this point, saying the two companies are “very community-focused. Everything is really about first-party data, audiences, communities.”

Weiner expected the Touchpoint brand to be dissolved into Arc in relatively short order. Asked what Touchpoint was hoping to get out of the acquisition, Weiner praised Arc’s “really large events,” noting that at present most of Touchpoint’s events are conferences.

“I have been watching their HR tech event, which is in September in Las Vegas, very closely,” he said. That conference, organized by Arc’s HR Executive brand, claims to attract more than 7,000 attendees and 400 exhibitors. In comparison, Touchpoint’s largest event attracts around 120 vendors.

“I’m in awe of the marketing of that event,” said Weiner. “The way that I look at events, and specifically delegate sales, is very much how I look at subscription sales. So the fact that they are doing such a fantastic job through social, just through marketing of the event—I think there’s a great opportunity for us to leverage across all of our marketing departments, the work that they’re doing on their large scale events, and build that across our subscription businesses as well.”

Arc’s Hart agreed, saying: “That capability in running very large expos—we think there’s a chance to apply that on the Touchpoint side, particularly the Benefits Pro Expo… to grow that in collaboration with our HR tech team.” There was also an opportunity, he suggested, to bring Touchpoint’s brands to Europe.

Hart said Arc’s revenue is “evenly balanced” between events and media, with the media segment in turn split between marketing services and paid content. Touchpoint’s largest revenue source is marketing services, followed by events and paid content. Weiner told AMO both companies are looking to grow their subscription propositions. 

Arc Networks was founded by CEO Simon Foster and EagleTree in 2021 with a build-and-buy strategy that has seen it grow through nine acquisitions, including Touchpoint. 

Weiner and Hart declined to provide specific revenue numbers for their businesses. Hart said Arc employs around 400 people, half in the U.S. and half in Europe.

EagleTree Connection ‘Made Things Move A Lot Faster’

Despite the two companies’ shared ownership, the executives said their marriage was not orchestrated from above.

The EagleTree connection “made things move a lot faster,” Weiner said, but it was Arc that initiated the connection. The split from the rest of ALM made Touchpoint much more visible, he said, and so other companies “said: ‘Oh, I want to have a look.’ And I think Arc was one of those businesses [to say] ‘Oh, I like that.’”

Hart said that “the introduction was of course made by EagleTree, but we knew each other’s businesses anyway, and given the strength of the fit that we talked about, it just makes sense to put the two businesses together.”

The private equity firm had also been “very, very candid that they would be patient with us,” Weiner said. “They were not in any hurry.” EagleTree instead just wanted to understand “what your strategic direction and where your growth strategy is.”

Looking ahead, Hart said the next order of business was to integrate the two businesses into “a cohesive culture, a cohesive way of working, a cohesive tech platform.”

“As we turn over the next three, six, nine, 12 months, we’ll be looking at what the revenue synergies are between Benefits Pro and our HR business… We’re looking at the synergies between the financial services business. But also, we’ll think about the lead generation products that exist on the Touchpoint side, how we can apply those to Arc’s, existing media brands as well.”