• by Larissa Faw , July 1, 2014

Last week, Publicis CEO Maurice Levy told Reuters that he intends to regroup and rebuild investor confidence by acquiring smaller digital companies to improve its digital services offering. 

Now, Publicis Groupe is making good on that claim by acquiring Crown Partners, an Ohio-based e-commerce and content shop. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Crown will be aligned with Razorfish and its staff will be integrated with Razorfish Technology Platform Services. "More details on the integration will be announced in the coming weeks," says Shannon Denton, North American CEO, Razorfish. "But one immediate result of this approach is that Richard Hearn, Crown’s CEO, will become executive lead over the Razorfish Technology Platform Services."

Crown Partners will work with Razorfish and support Razorfish's “commitment to identifying opportunities for business transformation that have commerce at their core,” the agency said.

Pete Stein, Global CEO of Razorfish, said: "The businesses with the best and most consistent customer experience will come out on top, and the only way to win is to effectively leverage technology and data. Delivering this strategy on an ongoing basis requires scale. Crown Partners will allow us to further expand on our efforts while accelerating time to market."

Added Denton: "Joining forces made perfect sense. Together, we’ll be able to scale our ability to deliver commerce and content technology services, especially given both of our organizations have deep existing partnerships with the Adobe and hybris platforms.” 

Founded in 2001 by Hearn and president Mark Kennedy, Crown Partners has more than 150 employees based at its headquarters in Dayton, Ohio and across U.S. offices in New York, Dallas and Denver.