Breaking News- Terralever merges with E.B. Lane to create a marketing powerhouse

Announced today, digital firm, Terralever, and advertising and public relations agency, E.B. Lane, merge to form a new marketing powerhouse simply named, LaneTerralever.
This merger is a bold move in response to market trends, and rivals the size, talent and capabilities found among marketing firms in the largest markets, east to west coast-and we’ll have it here in AZ.
The combination of the two agencies creates a full-service digital and advertising agency that is more than geared up to handle their national clientele. Total number of employees in the new agency, including Denver, will be more than 100, and total capitalized billing is approximately $100 million.
Both agencies are known for some of the largest accounts in the Great Western States and Fortune 500 companies. Some of the blended clients will include: Arizona Lottery, Time Warner Cable, Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee, Cable ONE, National Bank of Arizona, Fox Restaurant Concepts, DC Shoes, Cisco, Goodyear, among others.
Beau Lane, named 2013 Ad Person of the Year, will serve as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the new agency, and Terralever founder, Chris Johnson, will partner with Mr. Lane in leading the organization as President. E.B. Lane president, Todd Bresnahan, will become Chief Operating Officer of LaneTerralever.
“As an agency that has thrived the past 52 years, we recognize the importance of being progressive and being in a solid position to respond to market trends and the needs of our clients,” said Beau Lane, CEO, LaneTerralever. “Merging with a digital marketing leader such as Terralever is a transformational, bullish move that brings to our clients and to this region, the absolute best-in-class of all forms of marketing communications.”
We’ve been following Terralever’s growth, and this year alone they’ve taken home multiple awards such as The Stevie’s, the Webby and Best Places to Work and had a recent appointment of Andy Parnell to Chief Client Officer. I talked with President of LaneTerralever Chris Johnson about the merger.

Why was it important for you to merge with an advertising agency instead of acquiring a smaller one? 
When we began Terralever, we thrived on being different rather than traditional and for the last two years I’ve been looking for opportunities to accelerate our growth and broaden our services…we’ve been talking internally about adding on media services.
We’ve known for two years that we were not going to be a digital agency forever. The question then became  ‘do we build it, do we acquire an agency or do we merge?’ Over the next five years, I don’t believe being solely a digital agency or a traditional advertising agency wont be enough-the need for a complete set of services will greatly outweigh the individual specialists; we hired an investment banker to help us figure it out and here we are.
When Beau and I started talking, digital and technology would become a key integrated strategy for the client. It made more sense to come together and Beau and I are running this as a partnership.
So are you moving in together?
In Quarter 1, we will merge together physically into the building next to E.B. Lane. I love Tempe and have been here for 11 years, but there is a lot downtown can offer us.
What about your integration strategy?
We will start integration on our account systems and client services, but we are not in a hurry, we want to do it right and culture is very important to us. Beau and I are very conscious about the culture we have and spend a lot of time in the last couple of months examining our cultures and reviewing some of the differences.
[More specifically,] our client engagement is a bit different because we lead with digital, whereas E.B. Lane engages with their clients from more of a branding, public relations, broadcast and advertising side. For their current clients it makes it very easy for us to plug-in what we do digitally for the client. [However,] Terralever isn’t going to be an “add-on”, we will have an integrated strategy and can be all things digital for those clients.
For our clients, they look to us for things like branding and multicultural and social media, and we can bring in services to our clients as needed. In the end it’s going to take time to figure it all out.
Will there be any cost cutting efforts with the merger?
We are having record months right now, we will immediately start hiring, we are already seeing immediate growth…all this merger does is create a ton of opportunities for everybody.
To learn more about Terralever, President Chris Johnson spoke at AZTB Free Lunch Friday, watch his talk here titled “If it’s gonna get weird, get there fast.”
More about LaneTerralever
Combined, the award-winning marketing enterprise provides clients with product and service excellence in advertising; interactive marketing; technology services, development and design; social media; pubic relations; media strategy and multicultural strategy. Each organization proudly has been named Best Places to Work, Terralever in 2013 and E.B. Lane, for the fourth consecutive year.   
For more information, visit www.Terralever.com or www.eblane.com.