Publicis Groupe continued its yearslong streak of acquiring non-agency ad tech and data sales companies with the announcement on Thursday that it has bought Lotame, a data management system for advertisers and publishers.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Lotame has raised more than $60 million in its 19 years.
For Publicis, the deal is apparently about extending the number of households and individuals for its Epsilon consumer data segment, where Lotame will live within the holdco. In a short video published Thursday as an update on the company’s AI and data services, Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun frames the acquisition as an incremental extension to the number individual profiles in the Epsilon consumer data warehouse. Epsilon’s identity graph has 2.3 billion consumer profiles, Sadoun said, while Lotame’s Panorama ID counts 1.6 billion.
The Lotame background
The acquisition of Lotame marks the end of the line for one of the scrappiest and longest-running third-party programmatic vendors. It started out in 2006 as a publisher-focused DMP. Lotame’s main rival in the market, Krux, was acquired by Salesforce. But that market turned sour. The one-time Krux product, called Salesforce Audience Studio, was shuttered in February 2024.
Publishers moved on from first-gen DMPs. And Lotame navigated major changes to the category as new three-letter acronyms emerged. There was the CDP revolution, which came for early DMPs. Publisher tech like Permutive, 1plusX and Carbon got in the mix as well. In 2023, Lotame launched a data collaboration platform, its answer to data clean room tech.
For Publicis, the publisher tags may be less relevant than Lotame’s large data sales marketplace and its Panorama ID, an alternative advertising ID that extends the Epsilon network.
In an AdExchanger Talks podcast last year, Lotame Founder and CEO Andy Monfried, who will hold the same role within Publicis, compared Lotame’s philosophy over the past 19 years to the bands Grateful Dead and Phish, because during their shows they improvise songs around a known baseline.
There is no rigid adherence to one plan over years and years.
“We’re the little engine that could,” he said.
Publicis plans
Lotame does make sense in some ways as part of the Publicis Epsilon unit.
For one thing, Lotame is still transitioning from its beginnings as a publisher vendor to now being more of a buy-side business. As a Publicis business, it’ll be much easier to increase Lotame’s ratio of advertiser to ad seller client.
And aside from increasing Epsilon’s advertiser ID graph, Lotame is relatively heavy on data services for a programmatic company.
Monfried told AdExchanger last year that, while VC investors prefer automation tech for ad identity and curation, “I would build a services business around those.”
CMOs are inundated with pitches for tech like CDPs, clean rooms, identity, DSPs, SSPs and more, he said. “But no one is actually saying, ‘Let me do it for you.’”
The opportunity for a services-focused business that manages APIs and data on behalf of clients, rather than giving marketers the tech to do it in house, was like “a big light bulb going off over the past year for my entire management team,” he said.
That sounds like Lotame, despite being an early ad tech and mar tech hybrid, had thoughts of agency-type services in the offing.
Within Epsilon, Lotame will slot into a group that is built for data management services.
And how about this for foreshadowing, during the same podcast last year, when AdExchanger Managing Editor Allison Schiff asked Monfried whether he expects Lotame to IPO: “Yes, I do. In the next 18 to 24 months, there will be a forcing function for us, and one of those choices will be to go public. But I have turned down more opportunities at exit than I have ever dreamed of, and I actually like what I do.”
Either the force function came early, or Monfried finally received an exit offer he could get behind.
