Following a tepid 2023 for ad tech M&A, the sector had a little heat in 2024.
There were noteworthy deals throughout the year, including LiveRamp’s acquisition of data clean room startup Habu in January and Experian’s acquisition of DMP and curation vendor Audigent in December.
The number of ad tech deals nearly doubled during the first half of 2024 compared to the first half of 2023, according to LUMA Partners, and the momentum continued into the second half of the year. Ad tech deal volume was up 25% in Q3 year over year.
All deals were dwarfed, however, by the news early last month that Omnicom and IPG will merge (pending regulatory approval) to become the biggest of the holdcos and the largest advertising company in the world.
But from big to small, we covered it all. And by “it all,” we mean as much as our sanity would allow.
Here’s 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.”)
January
The year began with LiveRamp’s $200 million acquisition of Habu, which was a logical pairing. LiveRamp maintains the largest commercial identity graph, and Habu is a cross-cloud clean room specialist with native applications for walled garden platforms.
Later in the month, ecommerce tech platform Rokt bought AfterSell, a Shopify app that helps brands improve their checkout experience. And the sports content-focused tech company Minute Media acquired online video platform STN Video for $150 million.
The month ended with performance marketing agency NP Digital’s purchase of REBL House, a full-service creative and branding agency.
February
February kicked off with TEGNA-owned CTV ad platform Premion’s acquisition of Octillion Media, a DSP launched in 2019 to serve local CTV advertisers.
But the biggest news of the month was Walmart’s purchase of smart TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion. The deal, which eventually closed in December, was hardly about hardware, though. The rationale is all about data and advertising. Vizio has access to automatic content recognition data from more than 20 million smart TVs in the US.
March
Moving on, March was busy with a bunch of smaller deals.
Talent agency UTA bought Gen Z-focused marketing and creative services firm JUV Consulting; ad ops startup Aditude acquired gaming ad tech platform CPMStar; and retail optimization platform Threecolts snapped up Marketplace Pulse, an ecommerce marketing research business and industry content hub.
Later in the month, Sensor Tower, a mobile marketing analytics and benchmarking company, acquired its direct rival, Data.ai (which many would remember as App Annie).
Then, in a strange development, a team of executives at the in-game ad platform Bidstack banded together to buy their business back from investors and shareholders. The company had already been suspended from trading on the London Stock exchange after a failed attempt to secure an external buyer.
Finally, iHeartMedia’s SSP Triton Digital acquired AI brand safety and suitability startup Sounder to help scale its programmatic marketplace.
April
April showers brought news of a deal that didn’t end up happening, but it’s worth mentioning anyway.
Google seriously kicked the tires on a possible multibillion-dollar acquisition of mar tech company HubSpot, a major CRM business. The deal was eventually abandoned, though, likely due to regulatory concerns about Big Tech acquisitions.
But these deals did go down: Advanced TV advertising company Cadent acquired machine-learning-focused performance marketing company AdTheorent, and Essence magazine’s parent company agreed to buy women’s lifestyle publisher Refinery29 from Vice Media in an all-stock transaction that valued the publisher at roughly $400 million.
May
Onwards: Out-of-home ad platform Broadsign bought OutMoove, a digital OOH DSP based in The Netherlands.
And BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti confirmed to The Information that he was planning to offload the remainder of Complex’s assets, including First We Feast, the entertainment brand studio behind “Hot Ones.” (Fast-forward to December for First We Feast’s fate.)
June
After a quiet May, activity picked up early in June, starting with contextual ad platform Seedtag’s acquisition of Beachfront, an SSP that specializes in TV and video.
Then, Ari Paparo’s Marketecture acquired AdTechGod, an anonymous ad tech Twitter poster turned one-man content studio, along with The AdTech Forum, an information resource hosted by AdTechGod and Jeremy Bloom, founder and CEO of advertising and tech career mentorship company OhHello.
(As our Senior Editor James Hercher put it in one of the most fun ledes of the year, “Only in advertising is God himself up for sale.”)
A flurry of deals followed.
TV-focused DSP Madhive acquired Frequence, a software platform that helps local advertisers manage and sell CTV advertising.
Quonset, a solutions provider for user consent and privacy management, merged with Valence Labs, an R&D hub for cryptography tech founded by former Madhive CEO Adam Helfgott, to form a new privacy tech startup called Precise.ai.
French mobile game developer Voodoo bought photo-sharing app BeReal for 500 million euros with plans to introduce paid advertising.
Then came the latest example of SSP consolidation, with Equativ’s acquisition of Sharethrough, a supply-side specialist in native advertising.
On the first day of the Cannes Lions festival, Mozilla announced its acquisition of Anonym, a privacy-focused ad measurement startup founded by former Meta executives Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood.
And the month closed with mobile ad tech holding company Verve’s $185 million purchase of Jun Group, a mobile video and gaming platform.
July
The summer started as a grab bag.
First, Seedtag was at it again with its acquisition of Australian intelligence company JustEggs Digital.
David Ellison’s Skydance finally sealed its $8 billion deal to take over Paramount Global.
And CDP BlueConic acquired Jebbit, a company that creates quizzes, surveys and other interactive online features as a way to collect first-party data.
July also saw two high-profile events accompany acquisitions. British business conference giant Informa Group bought Cannes Lions owner Ascential for roughly $1.5 billion. And then Hyve Group, the B2B events company that produces ShopTalk, acquired Possible, a newly minted marketing conference in Miami that hosted its second-ever event in 2024.
Toward the end of the month, Publicis acquired the rather aptly named influencer marketing agency Influential for a reported $500 million, and programmatic media provider MiQ bought Pathlabs, a performance ad platform for independent agencies.
August
August began with a bang.
On August 1, Outbrain acquired Teads from Altice for $1 billion to become, in the words of Outbrain CEO David Kostman, an “end-to-end full-funnel platform for the open internet.” The deal was first rumored in July by Business Insider.
That same day, Reddit acquired Memorable AI, a creative testing startup that specializes in tailoring ad creative based on an advertiser’s previous campaign KPIs.
Later in the month, location data and measurement company InMarket bought ChannelMix, a marketing analytics startup primarily focused on media mix modeling. The attention metrics startup Adelaide used part of a $1.4 million extension of its seed funding round to buy Rita, an Amsterdam-based data marketplace for the EU.
Meanwhile, research and analytics company Circana announced two acquisitions: one of Nielsen’s marketing mix modeling business and another for NCSolutions, a joint venture between Nielsen and shopper data platform Catalina.
September
With the start of autumn, ad ops startup Aditude followed its March acquisition of CPMStar with a deal to buy Hashtag Labs, a software developer and service provider for publisher monetization.
And then there was a biggie: Publicis Groupe added to its commerce portfolio with the acquisition of Mars United Commerce, one of the largest independent agencies specializing in retail media. (Publicis also owns retail media SSP CitrusAd and ecommerce SaaS analytics business Profitero.)
Sticking with the commerce theme, the data platform Attain acquired an app called Merryfield that rewards users for buying clean label products.
Oh, and DirectTV agreed to acquire Dish Network from EchoStar – but the deal later fell apart in November.
October
Forging on, AdExchanger had the exclusive on the merger between video monetization platforms Connatix and JW Player to create a new entity called JWP Connatix.
Then, email marketing and identity company LiveIntent found a home with mar tech and data cloud platform Zeta Global in a deal worth $250 million.
Ari Paparo struck again, adding Ad Tech Explained – a newsletter by Trey Titone, NBCUniversal’s VP of product management for programmatic channels – to the Marketecture portfolio.
And in semi-related news, search optimization platform Semrush acquired Search Engine Land, a trade publication that focuses on SEO and all things search.
The month closed with another AdExchanger exclusive: TV measurement company Samba TV’s acquisition of audience data and contextual targeting solution Semasio.
November
Next up in November, MediaSense, a British company that specializes in managing media account reviews, bought independent marketing consultancy R3. Alliant, an audience platform built on consumer transactional data, was acquired by a private equity firm called Inverness Graham.
And then came two big (deal) deals: Viant’s acquisition of CTV data platform IRIS.TV and Mediaocean’s $500 million acquisition of TV analytics platform Innovid, which it merged with the ad server and DSP Flashtalking.
There was a rumor swirling, which AdExchanger reported on, that DoubleVerify was kicking the tires on Lumen Research, an independent attention and eye-tracking vendor. We’re still waiting.
Plus an honorable mention (because 🤣): In what may be the funniest thing to ever happen to online media, The Onion acquired the full rights to Alex Jones’s Infowars in a bankruptcy auction. (A judge later blocked The Onion’s winning bid in December over concerns that the auction was flawed, but The Onion’s parent company plans to continue pursuing the acquisition.)
December
And, finally, December was a doozie.
Walmart closed its acquisition of Vizio; Experian bought Audigent; three major holding companies (IPG, Omnicom and WPP) each acquired a small minority interest in Mediaocean as part of the company’s new certified partner program; and enterprise AI company Uniphore acquired a CDP, ActionIQ, as well the data engineering startup InfoWorks.
Next up, IPG acquired a retail analytics company called Intelligence Node and sold Huge, one of its two main digital agencies, to a private equity firm. IPG’s other digital agency, RGA, has been up for sale since June.
Meanwhile, YouTube-focused brand suitability startup Channel Factory is reportedly looking for a home.
And then came one of the biggest stories of the year: Omnicom’s plan to acquire fellow holding company IPG for $13.25 in an all-stock deal that could reshape the ad marketplace. (🎙️Listen to AdExchanger’s analysis on The Big Story podcast.)
In other news, ecommerce software provider Mirakl bought Adspert, which offers tools for optimizing pay-per-click campaigns, and mobile video ad platform LoopMe bought mobile monetization platform Chartboost from Zynga.
Last-minute honorable mentions: In M&A news that wasn’t, the Kroger/Albertsons merger was nixed after a US District Court judge upheld the FTC’s injunction to block the deal, and BuzzFeed sold First We Feast, producer of “Hot Ones,” for $82.5 million to a group of investors, including host Sean Evans and George Soros’s investment firm.
And that’s a wrap, folks. Now bring on the 2025 deals. It’s already January 2. What are you waiting for?
