Hasta La Vista
Verification provider IAS has been acquired by private equity firm Novacap for $1.9 billion.
Novacap will buy all outstanding IAS shares for $10.30 per share, around 22% higher than IAS’s roughly $8 share price as of Tuesday. The deal is expected to close this year pending regulatory approval.
The infusion of PE cash will help IAS invest in artificial intelligence, IAS CEO Lisa Utzschneider says in the release.
Once the deal is complete, Novacap will take IAS private. The company has been publicly traded since 2021 when it IPO’d under Vista Equity Partners. Vista acquired IAS in 2018 and reportedly still owned 40% of IAS’s stock as of June.
Vista – whose stewardship of IAS hasn’t been without its ups and downs – will conclude its investment in IAS after the deal closes. Although IAS traded as high as $25 per share in the months following its IPO, its stock has been on a rocky decline since late 2021.
Critics say IAS failed to adequately invest in tech innovation compared to its main competitor, DoubleVerify. As of June, DV’s market cap was $2.36 billion, compared to $1.07 billion for IAS. The two were once roughly equivalent.
Putting ‘AI’ In ‘Paid’
ChatGPT is now responsible for between 15% and 20% of all referral traffic for many large online retailers, including Walmart, Etsy and Target, as per data from Similarweb cited by Digiday.
Bear in mind, though, that referrals are only a sliver of the total pie, representing less than 5% of total traffic. They fall into the same bucket as affiliate publishers and blog links and exclude search engines, any paid media and direct visitors.
Still, ChatGPT – and, to a lesser degree, other startup LLM operators like Perplexity – face an awkward situation where they now drive meaningful, attributable traffic to many sites and marketplaces for which they take essentially no cut.
OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, is starting to get more serious about monetizing this under the new reign of Fidji Simo, its CEO of applications, who joined last month after a stint as CEO of Instacart. Simo, who also previously led the “big blue app” at Facebook, is looking for someone to head up ad sales and overall monetization, reports Alex Heath at Sources, his tech newsletter.
Meanwhile, Adweek reports that OpenAI posted a job listing for a “Growth Paid Marketing Platform Engineer” who will help build an in-house product for campaign management and reporting.
The Tariff Dip
The IAB is downgrading its US ad spend projection for the remainder of this year, per new projections in an update to its 2025 Outlook Study.
Brand budgets are being squeezed in the second half of 2025, according to the study. A whopping 91% of marketers cite uncertainty caused by the Trump administration’s ever-shifting tariff policy as the culprit.
Although ad spend in the first half of the year was roughly in line with the IAB’s original growth forecast of 7.3% in January, it expects growth in the second half to be just 5%. The IAB now expects ad spend will have grown by just 5.7% by year’s end.
Marketers say the auto, retail and consumer electronics verticals will see the largest reductions in ad spend through Q3 and Q4.
But the IAB expects the CTV, retail media and social media channels to continue to boom. It projects full-year growth of 14.3% for social, 13.2% for retail media and 11.4% for CTV.
Yet linear TV will continue to decline. IAB predicts linear spend will be down by 14.4% compared to last year.
But Wait! There’s More!
President Trump says China’s President Xi signed off on a deal to transfer TikTok ownership to a consortium of US-based investors, including Oracle and Silver Lake Partners. [AP]
Amazon agrees to pay $2.5 billion to settle an FTC lawsuit alleging it tricked users into signing up for Prime subscriptions that were deliberately difficult to cancel. [NPR]
The Department of Justice is suing states to get access to voter registration data. [Democracy Docket]
AdGood launches a charitable fund to make buying CTV ads more affordable for nonprofit organizations. [release]
Popular influencers are increasingly doing PR for authoritarian regimes. [User Mag]
Federal government agencies are cleared to use Elon Musk’s Grok AI – you know, the one that called itself “MechaHitler” back in July. [Bloomberg]
Spotify rolls out new policies to address AI audio slop. [The Verge]
Speaking of slop, for companies embracing generative AI tools, dealing with “workslop” complicates productivity. [Harvard Business Review]
How Ed Zitron became one of tech’s most outspoken naysayers and AI critics. [FT]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up … Want it by email? Sign up here.
