LONDON — Threepipe has acquired sports and sponsorship agency Earnie to boost its creative services offering.

Earnie was founded in 2015 by managing director Alistair Gammell as a specialist arm of marketing and design agency Earnest. The agency’s clients in the retail, sports, entertainment and corporate sectors include The England & Wales Cricket Board, The NFL, Monster Energy, Cricket West Indies, The Jockey Club and UK Sport.

The acquisition of the 12-people agency, completed immediately after an MBO of Earnie from Earnest, takes Threepipe’s headcount to around 90. Gammell will join the Threepipe management team and will lead the expanded creative services offering.

Threepipe merged with digital agency Blowfish in 2013, and in 2016 acquired SEO agency Spot Digital.

Co-founder Jim Hawker (pictured, right, with Gammell), told the Holmes Report: “This accelerates our ability to provide brilliant content. We’re running so many social and digital channels and digital out-of-home for clients now; we needed bigger capacity and to buy a team that had all the processes and technology in place to future-proof our needs. It’s helped round us off into more of a full-service agency. The other investment area is likely to be more analytics, but that’s not on our radar at the moment.”

He said it was likely that the Earnie brand would be retained for sports marketing clients, and there were no client conflicts: “In fact, Threepipe’s biggest sports clients, the England & Wales Cricket Board and the NFL, were already shared clients. It’s a great culture fit – we’ve been working together over a few years got to know the team really well. They’ve already moved into the office and we’re working on client campaigns. It’s been seamless.”

Gammell said: “The chance to place our creative offer at the heart of Threepipe was too good an opportunity to pass up. The team here are running campaigns for the some of the best known and fastest growing brands. Being part of Threepipe will help us meet the growing demand for measurable content campaigns on an international scale.”