Investment

Atlas Technology Group’s Brian Andersen shares insights on investment trends in the ad tech market and how AI is changing the M&A landscape.

Aperiam has a new approach to VC investing that now also involves a strategic consulting practice and matching startups in its portfolio with brands looking for programmatic solutions.

Super{set}, a venture studio led by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya – co-founders of Krux back in the day – is bringing on serial entrepreneur and Rembrand CEO Omar Tawakol as a general partner.

Read on for an inexhaustive list of the most notable ad tech, agency and digital content deals of 2024, with a few fun wild cards tossed in. (Looking at you, “Hot Ones.”)

HUMAN plans to build a deterministic ID from its tracking of more than 20 trillion digital signals per week across 3 billion devices, which will aid attribution for ecommerce.

The IAB projects digital video ad spend will rise to $63 billion in 2024, representing a 16% increase from last year. Of the three video ad categories the report breaks out (social and online video and CTV), the clear winner is social video.

Streaming services with the best chances of survival are those that can turn their media into a performance marketing channel with targeting and attribution that looks and feels like digital advertising – at least according to investors on Wall Street.

Reddit generates “substantially” all of its revenue through advertising, and its S-1 filing reveals its strategy for licensing data and becoming “the leader in contextual advertising.”

Overall deal activity in the ad tech market was down 10% year over year in 2023, according to LUMA Partners. But 2024 may be looking up.

Who got bought in 2023, and who did the buying? Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of the most notable ad tech M&A activity from this past year (with a few media and agency deals tossed in for good measure).

Digital media and marketing M&A is suffering from a prolonged case of anemia. The cause? Uncertainty in the market, according to LUMA Partners.

Aditude plans to spend the money doubling its headcount and enhancing its cloud-based prebid wrapper and other publisher tools.

Ad tech M&A has had a case of the Mondays since … late 2021. After the blistering pace of M&A during the height of the pandemic, deal activity in the ad tech sector slowed to a trickle in 2022 and has remained sluggish this year.

The company’s immediate plans for reinvesting its new capital include hiring more executive leadership to spearhead sales and partnerships, growing its engineering team and expanding its presence in the US and Japan.

On Tuesday, data collaboration and clean room platform Optable announced $20 million in Series A funding, with participation from Hearst Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, Desjardins Capital, Deloitte Ventures and asterX.

Tired in 2022: Growth at all costs. Wired in 2023: Realistic ad tech valuations. A return to Earth for ad tech and martech valuations is a good thing, says Conor McKenna, a partner at LUMA.

Despite rising interest rates and inflation, 2022 kicked off with a wave of M&A … that turned into a trickle … and became a relative dribble by the end of the year. Read on for a thorough (but non-exhaustive) refresher on M&A during the year that was.

Magnite’s quarterly revenue was up 11% year-over-year in Q3, with a large chunk of its growth coming from streaming. Growth guidance is conservative for next quarter, but Magnite expects AVOD inventory and retail media to become bigger growth drivers for its bottom line.

Commerce data platform Klover raised $25 million in Series B funding and changed its parent company name to Attain. The newly branded Attain will use the funding to launch what it’s calling a software-as-a-service (SaaS) commerce data platform for marketers.

Scaled ad tech M&A was up 150% in the third quarter, driven in part by private equity … so, hurrah? “I wouldn’t read too much into this, actually,” said Conor McKenna, a director at LUMA Partners, which released its Q3 market report in early October. The rise in M&A during the previous quarter is partially the result of a backlog from the first half of this year.

Major acquirers love software-as-a-service companies. Recurring, predictable revenue makes their ears prick up. So, why doesn’t every business, ad tech or otherwise, go down the SaaS route? Because for some it “would be a disaster,” says Tolman Geffs, managing director of BrightTower.

Are public ad tech companies totally screwed? “Um, do you want the short answer?” said Rocco Strauss, a partner at independent equity research firm Arete Research. “Because the short answer is … yes,” he said.

The audio advertising market is heating up, and investors are getting in on the action. Audio analytics platform Veritonic announced Tuesday it raised $7.5 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to date to $14 million. The company will use the funds to further its audio measurement and attribution capabilities and to grow its engineering and sales staff, said Veritonic founder and CEO Scott Simonelli.

Former Fox executive Joe Marchese’s early-stage investment fund, Human Ventures, is paying attention to attention with a $7 million seed investment in Adelaide, a startup that helps advertisers measure and evaluate media based on attention rather than proxy metrics like viewability or video completion rate.

Less is more for Dotdash Meredith, IAC’s fastest-growing business unit. When Meredith’s Health.com site migrated to Dotdash’s digital platform last week, the impact was immediate. Although the site now hosts 30% fewer ads, its pages load five times faster, and the click-through rate on ads is up by 60%.

It’s chilly out there, but PubMatic had a decent quarter. Organic revenue for Q1 totaled $54.6 million, up 25% year-over-year, representing PubMatic’s seventh consecutive quarter of 20% revenue growth or more. PubMatic’s stock was up a smidge, about .5%, in after-hours trading.

What do theme parks and streaming have in common? Together, they helped Disney beat expectations this quarter. Revenue for the first quarter of Disney’s 2022 fiscal year was just shy of $22 billion, up 34% from $16.2 billion this time last year, the company told investors on Wednesday. As a result, Disney’s stock surged around […]

Snap Inc. reported strong growth in its revenue and user base during its Q4 2021 earnings report. Total revenue for 2021 was $4.1 billion, which was good for a 64% year-over-year growth rate, the highest rate of annual revenue growth in company history.

After a pandemic-induced lull in deal activity in 2020, last year was wall-to-wall consolidation across the media and marketing technology sectors. Total deal making activity in 2021 was up more than 82% year over year, according to LUMA’s 2021 market report, released last week.

Is ad tech’s hot streak on the public market sustainable? No, and that’s not a bad thing. After four quarters of spiking valuations and an IPO runway so crowded that one ad tech company opted to postpone its IPO until next year, the market is starting to stabilize. Although some ad tech stocks achieved all-time […]