Telcos aren’t sick of ad tech yet, it seems.
On Monday, T-Mobile announced plans to acquire Vistar Media, an ad platform that specializes in digital out-of-home (DOOH). T-Mobile will pay approximately $600 million in cash and expects the deal to close in the next couple of months pending regulatory approval.
Digital campaigns should account for more than one-third of the $10 billion eMarketer expects buyers will spend on OOH media by 2027. DOOH in particular is having a moment as a competitive ad channel, which is why so many startups have cropped up to capitalize on the gray areas between OOH video and connected TV.
In acquiring Vistar Media, “we see tremendous opportunity to provide relevant and personalized advertising,” said JP Colaco, SVP and head of T-Mobile’s advertising business, in a statement.
Staying on target
DOOH ads may not be targeted to individuals, but that doesn’t mean those campaigns are devoid of digital-style targeting and measurement.
T-Mobile’s scaled number of mobile subscribers combined with Vistar’s media partnerships and OOH technology “means advertisers can easily place their ads where they know their audience will be,” Colaco said.
OOH ad tech uses impression multipliers, a reach metric based on how many unique mobile devices pass by a particular display or digital billboard at different times throughout the day. And T-Mobile has heaps of first-party data about its broadband subscriber base.
If an advertiser is trying to reach consumers in a certain region who enjoy, say, gardening or crocheting, that advertiser can hypothetically use a combination of mobile app downloads and location data to target specific real-world places or screens where that target audience might be found.
The acquisition of Vistar is also a sign that ad tech still holds some allure for telcos. There’s a long trend of telcos snapping up media and ad tech startups before eventually reversing their decisions, including AT&T’s Xandr (which it sold to Microsoft in 2021), Verizon’s media business comprising AOL and Yahoo (which it later sold to Apollo Funds) and Singaporean telco Singtel acquiring the demand-side platform Amobee (which it offloaded to ad platform Nexxen in 2022).
T-Mobile, which bought rideshare-focused ad startup Octopus in 2022 and mobile-focused ad tech company PushSpring in 2019, defies the trend.
Whether or not T-Mobile holds onto Vistar for the long haul is a different story. But for now, consider it the first major ad tech acquisition of 2025.
