One of the most viral advertisements of the most recent Super Bowl never ran on national television. Instead, 50 Cent's "Beef 101" campaign for DoorDash was built for social media.

Get Engaged, the Atlanta-based social-first marketing agency behind the campaign, has been acquired by SAMY, a global social-first marketing company, in what cofounder Cam Fordham told Fortune exclusively is a "low nine-figure deal," with a stock and cash component and an "injection of resources to scale even further." That values the transaction at no less than $100 million. The deal closed Sept. 30, and all three cofounders—Fordham, Alex Dermer, and Ben Hiott—are staying on, with Dermer taking the CEO title.

"Fundamentally, it's an acquisition, but the founders, all of us here today, will remain," Fordham said.

From Facebook side hustle to virality

Get Engaged began in 2016 as what Hiott describes as "essentially a side hustle." At the time, he was monetizing a handful of celebrities' Facebook pages while holding down a full-time job, with one foot still in the music business. Fordham, a former LSU football player with a deep roster of talent relationships, heard what Hiott was doing and proposed going into business together. Dermer, who was wrapping up a previous venture and working out of the same office building, became the third partner.

The agency's earliest clients were Atlanta hip-hop artists such as Waka Flocka Flame and T.I., whom the trio helped with meet-and-greets and tour merchandise.

"They kept coming to: What else can you do for us?" Fordham said. The founders decided to build an agency around the question Dermer framed this way: "What does a marketing agency look like in 15 years, and how can we start to be that answer today?"

The answer arrived at an unexpected moment, when many other businesses were struggling. During the pandemic, brands began shifting money from radio and billboard spots into digital placements, Fordham said.

"This is when TikTok started to really emerge," he added. Get Engaged pushed clients onto the platform, and the company began landing Fortune 500 brands.

The agency's growth has tracked a broader shift in advertising. Social media has overtaken paid search to become the world's largest advertising channel by spend, according to WARC Media. WARC forecasts that global ad spend will grow 9.1% to $1.3 trillion in 2026, with nearly 80% of it concentrated in retail media, paid search, and social platforms. Linear TV, meanwhile, accounted for 41.3% of global ad spend in 2013 but was on track to fall to just 12.4% in 2025. Against that backdrop, a nine-figure valuation for a social-first shop reads less like an outlier and more like a signpost of where the industry's center of gravity has moved.

That growth has translated into hiring. Get Engaged today counts more than 100 employees across Atlanta, New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles, and its client roster includes DoorDash, Perplexity, Raising Cane's, Universal Music Group, EA, and Sazerac. Fordham said revenue has grown 40% year over year. The founders said no layoffs will result from the partnership.

"There's this point of inflection when you flip that model and people start to come to you because they've heard of a campaign you've run or a big moment you've been a part of," Dermer said.

In February, DoorDash's 50 Cent campaign—a social-first push in which the rapper pulled items out of a delivery bag in thinly veiled jabs at Sean "Diddy" Combs and others—launched ahead of Super Bowl LX without a national in-game buy and became one of the most dissected advertisements of the game. For an agency whose model is built for feeds rather than commercial breaks, it was the most public demonstration yet of the playbook.

"To really impact culture, you have to understand how to drive content around the internet," Dermer said. "You have to understand where conversations start on the internet."

Why SAMY

The founders said inbound interest had been building, but SAMY stood out. The Madrid-founded company has roughly 1,200 employees across North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and is majority-owned by private equity firm Bridgepoint. The Raine Group advised Get Engaged on the deal.

"We weren't looking for someone to come in and fix what we had built," Hiott said. "It's not about correction—it's about connection."

The Get Engaged brand will continue to exist and operate as SAMY's U.S. arm. The combination pairs a 100-plus-person U.S. operation with a network of roughly 1,200 employees spanning four regions. Dermer credited a kinship with SAMY's cofounders, Patricia Ratia Garcia-Oliveros and Marta Nicolas: "There's a human component to this. At the end of the day, as you build to impact and to truly market, you have to get down to the fundamental human level of connection."

With the deal closed and the founders staying on, what to watch next is execution: whether Get Engaged's 40% year-over-year revenue growth, per Fordham, carries over under SAMY's ownership, and how the promised injection of resources is deployed across the agency's Atlanta, New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles offices.

This story was originally reported by Fortune.