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The open web is dead; long live the open web. It’s healthy; it’s full of opportunity; it’s doomed; it’s a mess. Also, what even is the open web, and do consumers care about the definition?

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.

2024’s most popular guest columns offer a snapshot of an industry in flux – and one that’s grown cynical due to repeated promises of unrealized change.

Publicis outperforms its agency holding company rivals because of three primary factors: technology strategy, leadership and deal-making.

During a Covid-induced two-day binge watch of a recent streaming hit, advertisers consistently failed to serve the right ad. Where’s the accountability?

Around this time last year, there were only a handful of companies testing the Chrome Privacy Sandbox. Now, according to Google, there are hundreds.

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.

Measurement and analytics company DoubleVerify touted its decision to acquire Paris-based AI startup Scibids for $125 million during its Q2 earnings call on Monday.

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.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The LUMA Escape LUMA Partners – the investment bank of ad tech, essentially – is having a major fracture.  Brian Andersen, a co-founder and partner, along with partners Mark Greenbaum and Dick Filippini, are all exiting over a disagreement with co-founder and CEO […]

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.

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.

Even the experts at companies whose future depends on explaining the value exchange of personalized advertising to consumers struggle to make a convincing argument. Part of the problem is that the ad industry’s MO has been to “overcomplicate” matters, said Lauren Wetzel, chief operating officer at InfoSum, speaking at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit earlier this week.

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 today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Seriously Looking Although MediaMath has been avidly pursuing strategic options for a year, including a potential sale, it hasn’t worked out. But now the company has hired a team of bankers to get the ball rolling again while ad tech M&A and IPOs are […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Terence Kawaja, CEO, LUMA Partners. CAVEAT: LUMA Partners is a leading M&A advisor to the ad tech sector. Hammer >>> Nail. The intersection of media, marketing and technology has always […]

Seven ad tech companies made transactions valued at over $1 billion in the first quarter of 2021 – double the amount that’s happened in the past few years combined. “We’ve got a perfect storm here of different forces lining up, which created such a strong quarter,” said Conor McKenna, LUMA Partners director. The ad tech […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Sweetheart Deals? Ah Google, if it’s not one thing it’s another. Now, it seems that the Big G has also sparked the ire of small ad tech firms who say the company has entered into a number of revenue-share arrangements with select ad tech […]

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 […]

Guess telcos really aren’t that into ad tech after all. On Thursday, Norwegian telco Telenor sold cross-device company Tapad to Experian in a transaction advised by LUMA Partners. Experian is acquiring 100% of Tapad for a cash consideration of roughly $280 million. Not too shabby for an ad tech company getting sold in 2020. Tapad’s […]

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 […]

Ad tech had a stellar 2019. You heard that right. The year started slow for ad tech M&A, but merger activity gained steam and the fourth quarter was one of the most active in recent memory, according to a Q4 market report released Tuesday from investment bank LUMA Partners. The number of scaled deals worth […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. That’s Settled Disney reached a deal with Amazon to carry Disney Plus on Fire TV sets. The two companies were at an impasse on a distribution deal because Amazon was demanding a substantial percentage of the media giant’s ad revenue, The Wall Street Journal […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Political Ad Firestorm Google is considering changes to its political advertising policy, according to The Wall Street Journal and Axios. The reports come as Facebook is under pressure from users, issue groups and regulators to block some (or even all) political advertising. Twitter banned […]