Brave Bison, The Brothers Building the Anti-Agency
Brave Bison just bid £50 million for M&C Saatchi's performance division. The offer got rejected. But that's not really the story.
When I sat down to interview Theo and Oli Green the news had literally just hit. Their company, Brave Bison, had made an unsolicited £50 million bid for M&C Saatchi’s Performance division.
M&C Saatchi said no. Called it undervalued. But here’s the thing—the bid itself tells you where Brave Bison is heading.
“As things stand, they’ve said they’re not interested in selling it,” Oli said. “But let’s see where it goes.”
This isn’t just another independent agency trying to get bigger through acquisition. The Green brothers are building something different. They call it a “media tech business,” which sounds like marketing speak until you look at what they’ve built.
Not Just an Agency
Most people compare Brave Bison to DEPT, the VC-backed roll-up that’s become the poster child for the new independent sector. The brothers see some similarities. But there’s a fundamental difference.
“DEPT is a services business,” Theo explains. “It sells time and programmes of work. Brave Bison doesn’t just do that. We obviously have our marketing execution business, which, yes, does look like parts of DEPT, but we have a more complicated business model.”
Here’s what that means in practice. While agencies make money selling their people’s time, Brave Bison has built multiple revenue streams.
“Financially speaking, only half of our profits come from services,” Theo says. “The other half come from monetising some kind of IP, and that IP could be content, or it could be technology.”
They’ve got the marketing execution arm that looks like a traditional agency. But then there’s their social publishing operation with over 400 YouTube channels, Facebook pages, and Snapchat shows generating advertising and sponsorship revenue. There’s Mini MBA, one of the UK’s most successful marketing education platforms and proprietary technology that clients can licence.
“We’re sort of part consultancy, part agency, part social publisher, part e-learning platform, part technology business,” Oli says. “I wouldn’t describe ourselves using all of those things, but in essence, there are those components inside of Brave Bison.”
This setup insulates them from the pressures killing traditional agencies. While competitors worry about utilisation rates and AI eating their billable hours, Brave Bison can grow through multiple channels.
“Brave Bison is not going to be a giant agency,” Theo says. “The business will be a combination of business models.”
Five Deals in One Year
The M&C Saatchi bid grabbed headlines. But it’s just the latest move in an extraordinary run. This year alone, Brave Bison has done five deals: Engage Digital Partners, Builtvisible, The Fifth, MTM, and Mini MBA.
The velocity is what’s remarkable. For years, they did not acquire any companies and then suddenly, five acquisitions in 2025.
“After we bought Social Chain, we really invested in building out the platform,” Oli explains. “What does that mean? It means we’ve got a layer across our business that has been built ready to ingest and integrate with either similar propositions or different propositions that create new departments or divisions inside Brave Bison.”
They spent years building the infrastructure. Systems, processes, integration playbooks. So, when opportunities emerged, they were ready.
“We’ve invested a lot into technology. We’ve invested a lot into processes and platforms that allow us to organise ourselves and effectively run ourselves very effectively,” Oli continues. “We’ve really invested in marketing and growth, so sales, and I guess we’ve just seen some really interesting opportunities come across our desk, and we’ve jumped on them.”
The acquisitions split into two types. Some are bolt-ons—The Fifth (influencer marketing) and Engage (sports marketing) expand existing capabilities. Others create entirely new divisions with different business models. MTM and Mini MBA fall into this category.
The M&C Saatchi Performance division would have been transformative.
“It would create one of the largest independent performance marketing businesses outside of the United States,” Theo says. “It would have almost no regional overlap. They’re very focused in Asia-Pacific. We’re very focused in the UK and Europe. And it would give us a real scale advantage when it comes to tech and delivery for bigger clients.”
The division works with Meta and Amazon. It’s headquartered in Singapore. Around 410 staff. Had the deal gone through, it would have added a minimum £8 million in adjusted EBITDA—increasing Brave Bison’s overall earnings by more than 80% to £17 million.
The Mark Ritson Acquisition
Of all this year’s deals, Mini MBA is probably the most interesting strategically. Mark Ritson founded it. Over 50,000 marketing professionals have taken the courses. It’s focused on fundamental marketing principles, the stuff that doesn’t change.
“In a world where technology is doing more and more of the heavy lifting, we think it’s so important for marketeers to speak the same language and be that much more experienced and more trained,” Oli argues. “If you sort of follow that thesis through, training and development and skills development becomes so much more important.”
Theo frames it more bluntly: “It’s a strange fact, but the reality is, 70 to 80% of marketers have no formal training. That’s true, and that is a complete difference to every single other business line out there. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, anyone working in HR, anyone working in project management, they’re all qualified professionals.”
The vision is to make Mini MBA the universal standard for marketing competency. The numbers suggest it’s not fantasy. The courses have 95% recommendation rates. The NPS score is higher than Apple’s.
“I think it’s because Mark is an education professional before everything else,” Theo says. “Mark is a teacher, and that means that the quality of the content is MIT level, University of Melbourne level. He’s not just a speaker. He really is an educator.”
Here’s the clever bit. Mini MBA taps into a different budget.
“This is a CMO budget,” Theo explains. “This is a marketing excellence budget. It comes from the CMO. We often are selling directly to that office, as opposed to through learning and development.”
The platform offers three courses now—marketing fundamentals, brand strategy, and management. They’re considering a US expansion, which would significantly multiply the addressable market.
The Other Pieces
MTM brings strategy consulting. They work with clients in media, technology, and sports entertainment. “They have really interesting strategy frameworks that they use to advise clients on how to navigate what has become a very complex and ever-changing media technology landscape, cultural landscape as well,” Oli says.
Builtvisible addresses something urgent: the shift in search behaviour toward AI chatbots.
“How customers’ websites show up in chat bot answer engines, AEO, some people are calling it, is becoming really important,” Theo explains. “E-commerce businesses have spent 10-15 years building their SEO, and that traffic is traffic that they can guarantee, regardless of how much money they spend on paid media. Now you’ve got a major change in search behaviour.”
SEO is evolving. It used to be technical, all about engineering. Now with LLMs, it’s swinging back toward content and authority. The fundamentals from ten years ago, but with AI layered on top.
“Traditional SEO became more about technology, more about engineering,” Theo observes. “With the LLMs, it’s more about content, the relevance, being able to build a story around a particular query.”
The Fifth strengthens influencer marketing capabilities. Engage doubles down on sports marketing at a time when rights holders are going direct-to-consumer with their own platforms.
Murdoch Money and Market Performance
Serious investors have noticed what the Green brothers are building. Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp took a stake through a combination deal with their influencer marketing divisions. News UK sold its influencer operation to Brave Bison for up to £7.6 million. Murdoch’s firm got shares in return.
Lord Michael Ashcroft, the former Conservative Party treasurer, is also a significant shareholder.
The market likes it. Brave Bison’s shares have nearly doubled during 2025. Market cap is around £82 million. The company lifted its 2025-26 forecast in September, driven by the MTM acquisition and new client wins—Primark, Tottenham Hotspur FC, EA Games, and Guinness World Records.
“We’ve won a number of new clients in the second half of the year, and that will really propel next year quite extensively,” Oli confirms. The company is seeing approximately 20% growth organic expansion plus acquisition gains.
Compare that to M&C Saatchi. While Brave Bison’s shares surged, M&C Saatchi’s stock has fallen 22% during the same period. The company issued sales warnings amid tough trading conditions. Its market cap of roughly £160 million is little more than half what it was worth three years ago when an offer priced it at more than £300 million including debt.
The Right Size
At around 400 staff with operations across the UK, Australia, India, and the USA, Brave Bison sits in an interesting spot. Big enough to service global enterprise clients. Small enough to move fast.
“We really are big enough to deliver but small enough to still care,” Oli says. “We’re a very entrepreneurial, fast moving, dynamic business. I think there are some businesses that are much bigger than us that actually are very challenged, because to reinvent their operating model in a world where AI requires you to do so, is that much more difficult the more people you are.”
It’s a pointed observation about the industry’s current crisis. Legacy holding companies with tens of thousands of employees face an existential problem. AI threatens to automate significant portions of their workforce.
“100,000 people or 50,000 people, even 10,000 people thinking about roles and responsibilities and how that needs to evolve is very, very difficult versus 400 people,” Oli notes.
Brave Bison’s structure reflects this. Each division has its own CEO and leadership team. They all report into a unified executive team responsible for shared functions.
“We think of the business as one company,” Oli explains, though he acknowledges the complexity: “With lots of people and acquisitions, complexity does land, but we try our best to simplify.”
The focus on integration distinguishes them from the traditional holding company model of competing internal agencies. “Everything they do could have span a height from that,” Oli says of legacy groups. “Our essence is really to take out to market a more integrated proposition that straddles consultative selling, delivery and training.”
AI Without the Hype
Unlike most companies treating AI as marketing buzzword, Brave Bison is systematically rebuilding around it.
“We’re continuing to invest into AI and making sure that our teams are licencing tech and then, as well as using our own proprietary tech,” Oli explains. “I think we are thinking a lot about how we connect parts of the business and bring solutions to clients together to really generate value for them.”
The approach is pragmatic. AI reduces the cost of content production for their publishing network. Makes training more personalised and scalable. Allows smaller teams to service larger clients.
It’s not about replacing people wholesale. It’s about rethinking how value gets created and delivered.
What’s Next
The brothers are eyeing further international expansion. Particularly the United States and Southeast Asia.
“The US is always exciting, but so is Southeast Asia,” Oli says. “Those are our two priorities.”
The M&C Saatchi Performance division would have provided an instant footprint in Asia-Pacific. Even without that deal, their trajectory suggests they’ll find other paths acquisition, organic growth, partnerships.
“Sometimes we’ll teach you. Sometimes we’ll give you the information to do it yourself. Sometimes we’ll do it for you. Sometimes we’ll help you come up with the strategy to do it,” Theo explains. “We don’t have to do everything.”
That flexibility might be their biggest advantage. Traditional agencies are struggling with AI-driven disruption. Legacy holding companies are trying to turn their super tankers. The Green brothers are building something that doesn’t fit into any single category.
“We will sell information in the form of data products. We will sell technology in the form of software as a service. We will sell learning and IP. We will sell services. We will sell consultancy,” Theo says. “It’s not going to be a pure play services business.”
The M&C Saatchi bid got rejected. But it announced Brave Bison’s arrival as a serious player. In an industry desperately looking for new models, the Green brothers are proving there’s more than one way to build a marketing company for the future.
Five acquisitions in one year. More is coming. They’re just getting started.
