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Spotlight, the world-leading analyst relations firm based in Kansas City, today announces its acquisition of Captivate Collective, the market-leading customer marketing and advocacy consultancy, to bolster its customer offering as it seeks to orchestrate the future of influence in the B2B buyer journey.
February 12, 2026, Kansas City — Spotlight has completed the strategic acquisition of Captivate Collective, creating the first end-to-end Influence Orchestration capability in the market. The move represents Spotlight’s first acquisition and marks a clear statement of intent: to define and lead a new category that reflects how influence truly operates across the modern B2B buyer journey.
As buyer behavior continues to fragment across analyst insight, customer validation, community signals, and AI-mediated discovery, B2B organizations are struggling with disconnected programs and uncoordinated influence. Spotlight’s acquisition of Captivate Collective directly addresses this challenge.
A Unified Approach to Influence
The combined business brings together analyst influence, customer advocacy, and emerging AI-driven discovery into a single, cohesive system. This unified approach enables B2B organizations to move beyond siloed initiatives and align influence across marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams.
For the past 14 years, Spotlight has pioneered the analyst relations category, helping the world’s most ambitious B2B companies engage, manage, and measure analyst influence. Spotlight already delivers customer influence services, including peer review sourcing and win/loss research. Captivate Collective’s deep expertise in Customer Marketing and Advocacy (CMA) significantly expands this capability, adding proven programs that activate customers as credible, scalable sources of influence throughout the buyer journey.
Driving Measurable Business Outcomes
Together, Spotlight and Captivate Collective now offer the market’s first true end-to-end Influence Orchestration capability — connecting strategy, execution, and measurement across the full buyer journey and customer lifecycle. The combined offering is designed to help organizations not only generate influence, but operationalize it to drive measurable commercial outcomes, from pipeline acceleration to deal conversion and retention.
Announcing the acquisition, Rick Nash, CEO and co-founder of Spotlight, said: “This acquisition is about more than adding new services — it’s about building the future of influence in B2B. Buyers don’t experience analyst insight, customer advocacy, and peer validation as separate motions, and neither should the companies trying to reach them. Captivate Collective has built one of the most respected customer advocacy practices in the market, with a clear point of view and exceptional leadership. By bringing our teams together, we’re creating a category-defining Influence Orchestration platform that reflects how influence really works today — and how it will work tomorrow.”
Liz Richardson, co-founder of Captivate Collective, said: “Captivate Collective was founded to elevate the voice of customers and make advocacy a strategic growth engine, not a side program. Joining Spotlight allows us to scale that mission dramatically — reaching more clients and helping organizations integrate customer influence earlier and deeper into the buyer journey.”
Deena Zenyk, co-founder of Captivate Collective, added: “Together with Spotlight, we’re building something the market has been missing: a unified, measurable approach to influence that reflects the realities of modern B2B buying. This partnership gives brands the ability to orchestrate influence with real intent and impact, rather than treating it as a series of disconnected activities.”
Looking Ahead
Captivate Collective will continue to operate with its existing leadership team, with clients gaining access to an expanded set of capabilities across analyst relations, customer advocacy, and influence measurement. The combined organization will invest further in innovation, talent, and technology to advance the Influence Orchestration category globally.
About Spotlight
Based in Kansas City, MO, Spotlight is an insights-driven analyst relations (AR) and influence orchestration firm with more than a decade of experience helping fast-growing companies (from start-ups to large Fortune 500 organizations) scale and accelerate their AR and peer review programs to maximize what clients earn from the channel. Spotlight is also consistently recognized as a Best Place to Work by the Kansas City Business Journal. For more information, visit www.spotlightar.com.
About Captivate Collective
Captivate Collective is a leading customer marketing and advocacy agency, significantly shaping the landscape of B2B client engagement. With an extensive track record in pioneering industry best practices, Captivate helps organizations design, launch and grow customer loyalty programs that drive measurable business impact in logo acquisition and account retention. Organizations like SAP, Amplitude, Cisco, UiPath, and more partner with Captivate Collective to transform customer collaboration into a strategic growth engine and competitive differentiator.
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