Talent platforms &Friends and Cavalry Freelancing to merge

With a surge in demand for talent in the creative industry, &Friends, a UK-based platform for freelancers, is merging with Cavalry Freelancing in Australia. The combined entity to be renamed as &Friends, will provide a tech platform covering services including sourcing, onboarding, managing and payment of talent across the world, the company stated. 

As part of this deal, &Friends will enter the APAC market with its tech platform and Cavalry will get access to the global mart for freelancers. &Friends enables agencies and businesses to tap into a global talent community, creating on-the-ground teams in any market, while blending existing talent pools and in-house resources. 

Current Cavalry GM, Rich Barlow, will continue to lead the APAC operations, while CEO Dave Bentley (former MullenLowe Profero MD) moves into a global role as Co-CEO. 

The brand recast from Cavalry to &Friends combines plug-and-play production teams with technology to help companies to manage talent, using an approach the firm calls ‘FlexSourcing, which blends in-housing, outsourcing and agency servicing.

"The marketing industry is experiencing high churn and a shortage of talent in the industry," Bentley, told Campaign Asia-Pacific. "Talent is vey much top priority for brands and agencies."

In Bentley's estimation, companies in the marketing services space are under pressure because the volume of content they need to generate has spiked in the past 18 months, but headcount at agencies and marketing departments hasn't kept pace.

&Friends' global headcount of nearly 7,000 people currently will grow significantly, Bentley confirmed. The business counts Campari, Revlon and Vodafone among its clients. "We are 50% busier than we were 18 months ago," he said, with the firm having grown its business through the pandemic. "In the next year or two we want to turbo-charge the business and change the way content is made in the industry."  

Platforms such as &Friends are benefitting from a marketing services industry in transition. "I don’t think industry has faced challenges like this before," &Friends CCO, Matt Carroll told Campaign. "There is growing demand for different kinds of skills in teams—not just creative capabilities—but also content and data talent to work together." And, with more work becoming project-based and less retainer-led, teams have to also be flexible in size and skillset.  

“What excites me about the synergy between Cavalry and &Friends is that it allows us to solve a fundamental, complex problem, very simply – while enabling clients and partners to create premium quality content faster, and at previously unthinkable costs," Carroll said in a statement.