WeWork Acquires Marketing, SEO Platform Conductor To ‘Humanize Marketing’

March 11, 2018 | Shared workspace giant WeWork announced that it was acquiring marketing and SEO company Conductor for an undisclosed amount. Conductor, a content intelligence platform, was co-founded in 2008 by Seth Besmertnik, who serves as the company’s CEO and has known WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann, an Israeli-born entrepreneur, since they attended Baruch College together in New York. Besmertnik told TechCrunch that the two “kept reconnecting and reconnecting over the years.” The two companies are already customers of each other’s services and have been working together since 2016. WeWork said in a statement that Conductor is “capitalizing on a revolutionary change in marketing, one in which marketers attract customers through relevant, high-quality content online instead of depending on traditional ad-serving models to drive online acquisition,” and that “if a new approach, platform, or service has helped our fast-growing global business flourish, we want to share those learnings with our members and beyond.” Together, said Besmertnik in a Conductor statement, “we’re going to be building a marketing cloud to go after the enterprise market.” He added, “where WeWork provides businesses with the right physical presence, Conductor will enable companies to have the right digital presence.” Conductor will continue to operate as an independent business and Besmertnik will continue serving as CEO. The company says it serves over 1,000 brands around the world, including Citibank, Salesforce, and CVS, and has raised over $60 million in total funding since it was founded, according to Crunchbase.