M&A started off with a bang in 2025. T-Mobile bought Vistar Media, and The Trade Desk bought Sincera. With a special guest from LUMA Partners, Conor McKenna, we explore the rationale for these ad tech acquisitions.
Google is keeping third-party cookies in Chrome, and here’s what ad tech Twitter (X, whatever), has to say about it.
Netflix is licensing yet more content from the coffers of cable TV, while G/O Media is selling its portfolio for parts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would be nice if we never had to hear the word “uncertainty” ever again … but too bad, because Q2 happened, and it wasn’t pretty for ad tech. The public ad tech and mar tech stocks tracked by LUMA Partners, which released its Q2 market report last week, fell more than 30% across the board year-to-date as of the end of the second quarter.
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 […]
Here’s 2020 in a nutshell from the investment banker’s point of view: “Turmoil caused acceleration and unexpected change, and it was a breeding ground for opportunity,” says Conor McKenna, a VP at LUMA Partners. After stalling to near zero during the first three months of the pandemic, conversations and negotiations started to pick up again […]
After a harsh first half of the year – Q2 was particularly gloomy – the M&A market is starting to rebound. Deal activity was up in the third quarter with particular momentum in gaming and digital audio, although ad tech and mar tech made a respectable showing, according to a Q3 market report from investment […]
It was a chilly Q1 for ad tech deal-making, and you can expect more of the same in the second quarter. But you can’t blame it all on COVID-19 – at least not entirely. The ongoing health crisis is only accelerating trends that were already rolling, said Terry Kawaja, CEO and founder of investment bank LUMA […]
