LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 26, 2025--
Dotdigital Group plc (AIM: DOTD), the leading SaaS provider of customer experience and data platforms (CXDP), has acquired Social Snowball Holdings, Inc., a US-based influencer, affiliate, and referral marketing platform for e-commerce brands, for $35 million USD.
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The investment brings together two fast growing technologies that until now have been distinct categories within the martech landscape. It will see influencer marketing treated as an integral part of Dotdigital’s product stack, enabling marketers to activate the power of word-of-mouth marketing, using their own customer data.
Addressing today’s biggest marketing challenges
With tracking on traditional paid channels increasingly limited, especially after iOS privacy updates, and paid media costs continuing to rise, many brands are shifting to more data-driven and cost-effective customer acquisition strategies. At the same time, Gen Z, who are expected to become the largest and most influential consumer segment by 2030 (Bank of America), are demanding more authentic, values-aligned engagement on the platforms they use most, and from the voices they trust: creators, peers, and online communities.
By uniting customer experience, data, and creator marketing, Dotdigital can empower brands to reach key audiences with trusted content and incentives. This helps diversify the marketing mix and transform influencer and affiliate partnerships into a scalable, performance-driven growth engine, powered by first-party data.
“The creator economy isn’t just about awareness anymore, it’s about revenue,” said Milan Patel, CEO of Dotdigital.
“Social Snowball brings an entirely new and highly complementary performance channel into our product stack, one that is fully aligned with how smart marketers want to grow - through measurable ROI, cultural authenticity, and direct connections to customer data. It enhances our market position as a one-stop-shop for seamless, cross-channel marketing automation and we’re thrilled to welcome Social Snowball into the Dotdigital family.”
Cultural and technological alignment to drive growth
Founded in 2020, Social Snowball empowers brands to activate prospects, customers, and creators as authentic advocates, offering incentives and rewards to promote products through trusted word-of-mouth, without requiring significant upfront investment. With sophisticated attribution and analytics built into the platform from day one, Social Snowball gives marketers full visibility into revenue generated, not just clicks or impressions.
With over 1,500 subscription-based Shopify customers including G Fuel, Brez, and True Classic, Social Snowball’s integration will accelerate Dotdigital’s reach in the fast-growing Shopify merchant ecosystem, aligning with its total addressable market expansion and product-led growth strategy.
Noah Tucker, Founder and CEO Social Snowball, commented:“ We are super excited to be joining forces with Dotdigital. Together we'll enable brands to build influencer marketing programs at a scale that was never before possible, helping them turn influencer and creator partnerships into a powerful customer acquisition channel. From the start it was clear Dotdigital was the perfect fit for our team, our culture and our customers and I look forward to what the future holds.”
This news follows Dotdigital’s acquisition of e-commerce personalization platform Fresh Relevance in 2023.
About Social Snowball
Founded in 2020 by Noah Tucker, Social Snowball is an influencer management platform designed to help e-commerce businesses accelerate growth by turning prospects, customers, influencers and affiliates into brand advocates who promote products in exchange for commission or rewards. In doing so, brands can create a highly effective marketing channel that expands reach, builds trust through third-party advocacy, and drives measurable results without significant upfront investment.
Social Snowball automates the onboarding, tracking and payout processes for brand advocates, enabling scalable, performance-driven affiliate marketing programmes that drive new customer acquisition and revenue, all from a single control center. A key competitive advantage of Social Snowball is being built from the ground up with analytics at its core, enabling brands to measure and track when influencer, affiliate and referral activity converts to revenue, allowing clear ROI visibility beyond just clicks and views.
About Dotdigital
Dotdigital Group plc (AIM: DOTD) is a leading provider of cross-channel marketing automation technology to marketing professionals. Dotdigital’s customer experience and data platform (CXDP) combines the power of automation and AI to help businesses deliver hyper-relevant customer experiences at scale. With Dotdigital, marketing teams can unify and enrich their customer data, identify valuable customer segments, and deliver personalized cross-channel customer journeys that result in engagements, conversions, and loyalty.
Founded in 1999, Dotdigital is headquartered in London with offices in Manchester, Southampton, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo and Cape Town. Dotdigital's solutions empower over 4,000 brands across 150 countries.
Headshot of Noah Tucker, Founder and CEO of Social Snowball.
Headshot of Milan Patel, CEO of Dotdigital
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
