2024’s Biggest Adtech Deals Show the Industry’s Shift to Strategic M&A

Adtech M&A has started to pick up the pace in the last few weeks.

Third-quarter deal volume was up 118% year-over-year and up 26% quarter over quarter, according to data from Luma Partners, Axios reports. That’s the highest rate since the first half of 2022.

Driving the deal growth is an increase in digital ad spending—recent earnings from some public adtech firms like The Trade Desk and tech giants like Google have been strong—plus a sense of “cautious optimism” going into 2024 after a couple of tough years, said Bill Wise, CEO of Mediaocean.

Sure, there have been many deals in 2024, but most of these were rational, consolidation transactions characterized as opportunistic deals at reasonable or low valuations.

But what has picked up the pace lately are the number of more strategic deals. These deals focus on where the future of digital advertising is heading and can lead to stronger valuation multiples, said Conor McKenna, partner at investment firm Luma. In other words, strategic deals signify a healthy market.

McKenna expects there’s more of this to come in 2025. “These will focus around key themes such as CTV and commerce media, and critical capabilities tied to the optimization of performance, addressability, creative, and measurement,” said McKenna.

Another force tying these deals together is the push for scale, more robust omnichannel capabilities—especially in video—and a trend towards optimizing bottom-funnel conversions that deliver more precise ad spend ROI, said Mark Wright, chief of M&A advisory practice at Prohaska Consulting.

“As this acceleration happens, the industry could very well see a frenzied game of musical chairs as more and more players enter the M&A game fearful they will be left standing alone when the music stops,” said Wright. “Our industry is growing up.”

ADWEEK compiled a list of significant M&A deals this year and what they tell us about the state of the industry.

January: LiveRamp buys Habu for $200 million

Cast your mind back to January, when the weeks felt long, and the year’s infinite possibilities stretched ahead. Those possibilities would have felt very bright for LiveRamp, which snapped up Habu, combining two titans in the data clean room world.

Historically, LiveRamp has focused more on helping advertisers on the open web, while Habu targeted black-box systems like Google and Meta. LiveRamp expects the acquisition to generate a tidy $18 million in revenue in its 2025 fiscal year.

Privacy-preserving tech is a smart bet, and major brands and agencies have been investing in clean rooms for the last few years. But we might see a winnowing: the FTC in November warned firms that it’s got its sights on data clean rooms for not being as squeaky clean as the name implies.

February: Walmart buys Vizio for $2.3 billion

One of the year’s highest-valued deals, Walmart is hoping that having Vizio under its wing will help it seriously compete with Amazon.

Vizio’s TV tech, particularly its automatic content recognition data, collects data on viewing habits, ad preferences, and purchase behavior. This opens up a bunch of opportunities for the retailer in targeted ads, shoppable formats, and a more holistic package for advertisers. This will all tie in Walmart’s first-party data and in-store activity, not to mention its retail media arm, Walmart Connect, further blending the lines between CTV and retail media.

June: Equativ buys Sharethrough for an undisclosed amount

Equativ, a supply-side platform headquartered in Paris and New York, acquired Sharethrough, an ad exchange with a strong North American presence and a specialty in native advertising. At the time of the announcement, Sharethrough was valued at between $100 million and $125 million, and the combined net recurring revenue of the two companies will be above $200 million.

The combined firm aims to give the industry a more differentiated type of SSP, as well as compete with walled gardens.

It’s been a busy year for Equativ, who also bought retail tech platform Kamino in September to boost its retail media chops. The terms were not disclosed.

August: Outbrain buys Teads for $1 billion

The first unicorn deal in the sector for several years was exciting news, even if Teads had been on the market for some time, first hiring Morgan Stanley to advise on the sale in September 2023.

The merger changed the makeup and scale of content recommendation firm Outbrain, creating a large ad platform that combines its technology with Teads’ video and branding solutions.

Several parties looked at and passed up on buying Teads, and some calculated $1 billion as an opportunistic price for Outbrain.

The merger offered a strong point of differentiation between Outbrain and its main rival, Taboola. Outbrain is focused cementing on improving demand-side video operations while Taboola has been doubling down display and performance marketing, according to sources speaking to Digiday.

October: Zeta Global buys LiveIntent for $250 million

In a nod to the growing importance of first-party data, Zeta Global, an AI-powered marketing cloud platform that uses AI and first-party data to help brands analyze customers’ pre-purchase actions and behavior, got access to LiveIntent’s assets, publisher network with 2,000 publisher relationships, and identity graph. LiveIntent’s technology helps publishers sell ads in email newsletters with an identity graph that includes 235 million hashed email addresses.

Several weeks after the announced acquisition, LiveIntent laid off 35 people, roles that “were duplicative with existing Zeta resources.”

November: Mediaocean buys Innovid for $500 million

Last month’s big strategic acquisition news—that ad solution platform Mediaocean will merge adtech platform Innovid with Mediaocean’s ad-serving subsidiary Flashtalking—had onlookers excited about the new entity’s potential to challenge Google’s adtech supremacy.

Mediaocean says the deal will give advertisers more control over their data and where to spend their ad budgets.

With the majority of ad spend focused on Google, Amazon, and Meta, Mediaocean’s Wise believes there is “power in independence, power in neutrality, and power in scale,” he told ADWEEK. Wise believes that based on recent conversations he’s had since the announcement, there’s more evidence that “large marketers do not want to always work with Google.”

December: Experian buys Audigent for an undisclosed amount

In December, data giant Experian announced it was welcoming data activation and identity firm Audigent to its family. In doing so, the firm showed how adtech’s latest darling, curation—or the process of selecting quality inventory to target specific audiences—is influencing the market.

Audigent has been a leader in curation, moving audience targeting to the sell side as the slow death of third-party cookies makes broad audience targeting through DSPs less viable. The companies have worked together since 2022, including integrating Experian data into the Audigent SmartPMP. Audigent launched in 2015, and its leaders reportedly had been looking for an exit for some time.

But the recent flurry of brands and tech companies standing up curation products adds more heat to the buzz.