• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, November 11, 2021

Former 360i CEO Jared Belsky, who left the Dentsu agency in June, and BizChair founder Sean Belnick have been busy the past couple of months building a new marketing company called Acadia, based in Atlanta. 

The firm just completed the acquisition of analytics company Lift361, which has a software-as-a-service platform designed to help smaller companies get to know their customers better by crunching first-party and other data. 

The platform, called ShopFluency, is positioned as a tool that can shape a tailored customer approach from product to marketing and deliver a more effective media targeting plan. 

Lift361, whose core team is staying intact and joining the senior leadership team of Acadia, is the latest of four M&A deals that Acadia completed since opening its doors in July. The others include digital-marketing agency Techwood Digital, ecommerce agency Nicely Built, and social agency Imagine Media. 

The Lift361 acquisition adds clients, such as Massage Envy and Florida-based retailer Bealls, to Acadia’s existing client roster, which includes Greenlight, NASDAQ, Hexagon and Pipette Baby.  

“We’re coming from a nontraditional point of view,” said co-founder Belnick, who started BizChair some 20-plus years ago when he was 14. “Jared is a renegade agency guy with a good sense of what’s important to companies. I’ve been a client of many agencies, so I know what matters most personally to clients. And we know how to find and merge really good partners together.”  

Acadia intends to expand with additional marketing specialist acquisitions, structured so founders will stay with the company.