DIVISADERO joins MERKLE: 10,000 reasons to be proud

DIVISADERO is the street that runs from the Castro to the Marina, the world's digital metropolis par excellence: San Francisco.

Funnily enough, the straight-line distance from number 1 at the intersection with 14th St. to number 3838, roughly reaching Marina Blvd., is almost 5 km. In other words, covering DIVISADERO end to end and back comes to approximately 10,000 meters. First sign.

The Danish company Lego owes the origin of its name to the Danish term Leg godt, which roughly means “play well”. When in 1949 Ole Kirk Christiansen bought the first plastic injection machine to translate his wooden idea into the first Lego brick, something big was about to happen. Perhaps genius had to receive its tribute in the form of a gift from each and every one of us who love Lego. Today Lego manufactures some of its inventions born from the inventiveness and ingenuity of its anonymous players.

The Lego IDEAS program is a co-creation platform with users where the Danish multinational lets people submit ideas, dreams, inventions, and lets users confirm project approval with their own votes. How many votes does an idea need to be implemented by Lego? The answer speaks for itself once I tell you these anonymous players stop being anonymous when they're invited to join the “10K Club”. Second sign.

In the second chapter of the book "Outliers: The Story of Success" (Gladwell, 2008), Malcolm Gladwell posits his theory of mastery in life. You may not have read it, and it's also quite possible you've heard at some point that we can all achieve mastery in life when we bring focus and persistence to it. From the founder of Sun Microsystems, to Bill Gates, to the Beatles, Gladwell reflects on the number of hours that would allow any of us to reach a certain level of mastery. And it's possible there's a combination of genetics, and mastery is what makes the master: "In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours." Third sign.

"Achievement is TALENT plus PREPARATION" -Malcolm Gladwell

Today, April 6, 2017, a bunch of dreamers in love with data, hailing from one of the most beautiful places to live in the United States according to Money magazine, Columbia, Maryland, have set their sights on a Spanish consultancy hailing from another beautiful city in northern Spain (Gijón), with the aim of expanding their global leadership in a practice that pivots on one of the 3 pillars of Digital Transformation: mastery in the use of data as a lever for digital maturity.

Merkle (merkleinc.com), the leading performance marketing and data agency, today announced the acquisition of DIVISADERO (see news), Merkle expands its operations and data offering in Europe through the acquisition of DIVISADERO (divisadero.es). This is Merkle's second corporate acquisition since joining Dentsu Aegis Network in August 2016 and Merkle's fourth European acquisition in two years.

The acquisition of DIVISADERO not only increases Merkle's global scale in the Spanish-speaking market, it also enhances Merkle's specialized offering in data management and analytics.

Merkle's purchase of DIVISADERO marks the American data-marketing giant's firm commitment to Europe and its undisputed leadership in Spain in the growing industry of data-specialized digital consultancy.

From Columbia in Maryland to Gijón in Asturias, Spain, there is a distance of 2,982 nautical miles, which comes to about 5,523 kilometers. Roughly a round trip from Columbia to Gijón again comes to the same magnitude we reviewed earlier:

10,000 motives — fourth sign or revelation?

#ProutToBePartOfThisNEWTeam

Bernardo Crespo is Digital Transformation Leader at Divisadero.

Director of the Executive Program in Digital Transformation at IE Business School and an Ontological Coach certified by Newfield Network in Bogotá (Colombia).

Bachelor's degree in Business Studies from UCLM and final year of a BA Honours in Management and Economics, University of St Andrews. Executive Master's in Relationship Marketing, CRM and E-Commerce from ICEMD. Worked as digital marketing director at BBVA España.

I currently help companies walk the path of Digital Transformation at DIVISADERO (a Merkle company)