mergers and acquisitions

Who bought what and why this year? Here’s a (mostly) comprehensive list of all the notable ad tech, agency and digital content deals of 2025.

Looks like Pinterest has its eyes – or its pins, rather – fixed on connected TV.

Atlas Technology Group’s Brian Andersen shares insights on investment trends in the ad tech market and how AI is changing the M&A landscape.

In 2017, Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise predicted the demise of supply-side platforms. The category survived, but he’s sticking to his theory that pureplay SSPs are a thing of the past. Plus: An update on Mediaocean’s $550 million Innovid acquisition and Wise’s counterpoint to recent criticisms of The Trade Desk.

Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

Read on for 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.”)

OpenX would like people to stop thinking about supply-side platforms as “dumb pipes,” thank you very much.

Upfront negotiations might take longer than normal this year. Plus, Meta is already in hot water with the EU’s new digital regulations.

There are two paths to transforming your business to capitalize on first-party-data-based advertising: mergers and acquisitions, or making nonrecurring investments. Here are the pros and cons of each.

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.

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.

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.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Ka-Thunk Goes The CNIL The CNIL, the French data protection authority, fined Google $170 million and Facebook $68 million because they don’t make it as easy to reject cookies as it is to accept them. It takes multiple clicks to decline cookies – and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. M&A&A&A&A Digital ad dealmaking is off to the races in 2022 like a sprinter who doesn’t realize it’s a marathon.  On Tuesday, Human (née White Ops) raised $100 million from a new co-owner investment firm, and Integral Ad Science acquired the French startup […]

The first half of 2020 was pretty lean. This year is on track to be the slowest since 2015 in terms of deal activity, according to LUMA Partners. But set the table and get out the gravy boat, because strategic M&A started to pick back up in Q3 and the momentum has continued into the […]

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 […]

If you’re a mature marketing technology platform: Congrats. 2018 was your year and the future looks bright. But if you’re an ad tech company without a unique value prop that’s jonesing for an exit, apologies, the outlook remains fairly bleak. Although digital advertising is still growing – it’s a $100 billion market today – Google and Facebook […]

JEGI Co-President Tolman Geffs will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 23-24, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt New York. “There’s been a hell of a pullback investing in anything that remotely smells like ad tech,” according to Tolman Geffs, co-president of investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group Inc. But that’s not as dire […]

Mazel tov, it’s a merger. On Tuesday, Judge Richard Leon gave his blessing to AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The judgment capped five weeks of testimony, six weeks of deliberation and a fair amount of nail-biting in executive suites from Dallas to New York City. But now that the deal is finally sealed, […]

Elgin Thompson, managing director of Digital Capital Advisors, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference on April 10-11 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. The passion of Wall Street’s 2013-era love affair with ad tech may have cooled, but investment banker Elgin Thompson expects the industry will produce some noteworthy exits yet. “I […]

Facebook and Google are no longer the ad tech acquirers they once were, and yet, the M&A landscape of 2017 is littered with their fingerprints. Media companies swallowed one other to add scale and massive amounts of content to stave off the duopoly’s dominance. Just look at Meredith-Time, AT&T-Time Warner and Disney-Fox. AT&T’s bid for […]