UPTHRUST and The House of Marketing welcome Grava and reinforce their market leadership position in digital performance marketing and growth marketing 

Mechelen, Diegem, November 23rd, 2020 – Digital acceleration agency UPTHRUST, sister company of The House of Marketing, is joining forces with digital performance marketing agency Grava. This sees UPTHRUST further expand its growth and performance marketing offering on the European market. This new partnership will enable UPTHRUST and Grava to jointly offer a broader range of digital performance marketing services to customers to achieve profitable growth. 

UPTHRUST took over digital product studio Gafas in June. Today, the company announces a new partnership: digital performance marketing agency Grava is joining UPTHRUST and The House of Marketing in order to further accelerate the group’s growth. “While working on joint projects, we found we shared a similar mindset and were complementary in a lot of areas. Joining forces will enable us to secure growth for our Belgian and international customers in the short term by way of growth acceleration sprints, but equally in the long term through performance marketing strategies”, UPTHRUST founder and Managing Partner Dennis De Cat comments. 

Baseline performance marketing + experiments = profitable growth 

Dennis De Cat goes on to explain: “We believe in rapid experimentation and performance marketing as a long-term growth strategy. Our digital experts help businesses implement an experimentation culture (including setting up new channels, adopting different tactics and fresh angles) which yields new customers and/or a boost in business in the short term. By converting experiments into a sustainable performance marketing process we are extending UPTHRUST’s customer service. Performance marketing is a crucial element in maintaining growth on a sustainable basis. In recent years, Grava built a strong reputation for itself in ‘baseline’ performance marketing. The combination of UPTHRUST and Grava gives us a competitive edge to approach the market. In doing so, we accelerate hyper growth in the short term and industrialize profitable growth in the long term.” 

“Over the past few years, Grava has been focusing on long-term partnerships whereby we use digital performance marketing to pursue sustainable growth for customers such as Krëfel, ZEB, Leen Bakker, Whirlpool and Isabel Group. We have set ourselves up as marathon runners, whereas UPTHRUST are the sprinters”, Grava founder and Managing Partner Dennis Kenis adds.  

“We are set to leverage our complementarity to serve our joint customers even better. In addition, we will be drawing on our unique proposition to attract new customers”, Dennis De Cat fills in. 

Strong network packs greater punch 

Including Grava’s 18 staff members, the group now consists of a strong team of +150 exclusive digital marketing & sales professionals. Grava brings in a strong customer network, a series of awards and unique partnerships on the Belgian market, which include Google, Facebook and Adform to name just a few.  

For now, the three entities will continue to exist alongside one another, with each company retaining its own DNA. Together however, the players very much make up one squad: for each customer and project, the best tailored team will be put together, made up of the best experts.  

Expansion at home and abroad  

The group is now raising the bar for their international ambitions. Managing Partner Expansions at The House of Marketing & UPTHRUST Grégory Delens confirms: “We see expansion as a dual endeavour: we aspire to widen and strengthen our areas of expertise through a buy & build strategy while also focusing on territorial expansion. UPTHRUST and Grava currently manage digital campaigns in over 30 countries, with offices in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.” 

This growth is also made possible by strong main shareholders Down2Earth Capital and Quanteus Group, which came on board at The House of Marketing in 2014.