There were three significant adtech mergers and acquisitions last week: The Trade Desk acquiring Sincera, T-Mobile acquiring Vistar Media for $600M, and Rokt acquiring mParticle for $300M. Here are thoughts on each, including what each tells us about the broader dynamics of the adtech industry.

TTD and Sincera: an evolution toward quality outcomes

We're in an Outcomes Era in which every adtech company needs to prove it can drive better marketing outcomes to justify its place in the budget / stack.

At the same time, 2024 — the year of MFA hysteria, curation, TTD's "premium internet" push, and a conversation about AppLovin's surge and whether performance marketing really drives incremental results — showed that there's an anxiety embedded in this pursuit of outcomes. If we're all in on outcomes and the technologies that drive them, how do we trust that the outcomes are real? That they represent incremental sales?

The natural direction for this tension between the Outcomes Era and quality concerns is a synthetic focus on quality outcomes. That is what TTD's "premium internet" push is really about — you can trust us to drive quality outcomes without tarnishing your brand in the process.

So, in a sense, the Sincera acquisition perfectly aligns with the broader direction of the adtech ecosystem and TTD's stated strategic direction. It's about ensuring that TTD remains the no. 1 vehicle to drive marketing outcomes on the open web and CTV — by retaining trust and answering those quality concerns that nip at every media buyer, who beneath all the reporting dashboards wonders, "Are these results really legit?"

That's the question Sincera would seem to answer (quality outcomes, quality media), and it's a critical one for TTD.

At the same time, buying quality media doesn’t necessarily amount to driving incremental outcomes, and performance-oriented competitors will continue challenging TTD, which is the no. 1 home for brand advertising, on those grounds.

T-Mobile and Vistar: a DOOH acquisition that recalls CTV arguments

Some dynamics others have pointed out about T-Mobile buying Vistar Media:

• $600 million is a relatively small bite of the adtech apple for a company whose market cap is $250B. As Neil Murphy of Azerion argued, this may be a test, building on the telco’s previous acquisition of OOH company Octopus. If it works, T-Mobile may come back for another, more financially material acquisition.

• OOH companies have argued for years that their channel, which is widely viewed as relatively unmeasurable, actually is quantifiable through mobile location data. T-Mobile has the mobile data to quantify and therefore boost the value of OOH investments.

Another facet of the deal I’d highlight is the parallel between how companies like AppLovin have written about CTV and the potential of T-Mobile to exploit OOH as an upper-funnel channel to drive lower-funnel outcomes (e.g. downloads or transactions) on mobile. In other words, AppLovin, which is historically a mobile company that owns the CTV company Wurl, argues that you can put these channels together to build something greater than the sum of their parts. Drive incremental awareness / demand on CTV and activate it on mobile. 

The same full-full marketing strategy could feasibly be executed by pairing DOOH and mobile. Perhaps that is part of T-Mobile’s calculus.

Rokt and mParticle: with customer data, more is more (for now)

It’s cliché to argue that adtech or martech companies have merged “for scale.” But when it comes to maximizing the value of customer data (whether we’re talking about CDPs, DMPs, or data clean rooms), the scale of the data or network really is critical to the value of the technology. Rokt and mParticle need to understand as much as they can about as many consumers as possible to drive the maximum potential value for their brand and retail customers. Without this capability, it’s easy for a company in this category to be displaced by a larger competitor that says, “Let me put the entire puzzle together for you.”

On top of this need for scale and depth, which transcends any given moment in time, the vibes around CDPs have been dubious of late as the industry questions whether they can deliver enough value to justify their price tag. Merging two companies that reportedly drive more value when combined should come with cost efficiencies that advantage the post-acquisition Rokt, both in terms of its ability to cut its own costs and possibly edge out competitors who are trying to do more with less in terms of data, people, and technology. Plus, Rokt operates at “the transaction moment,” making its value more obvious than that of a standard CDP and possibly defusing questions about the value of the latter. In an Outcomes Era, each ad/martech company wants to be as close to the ultimate outcome, transactions, as possible. This deal pushes the combined Rokt-mParticle in that direction.

Finally, looking forward, one might wonder how the development of AI will affect the value proposition and incumbency advantages of companies such as Rokt and mParticle. For example, will new technologies emerge that make data both more available and digestible to brands and retailers — and that use AI to craft the sort of personalized experiences that adtech and martech companies wax poetic about but that rarely materialize from our vantage point as consumers? 

Crosshatch founder Soren Larson, whose company aims to aggregate context from a consumer’s entire digital life (with the consumer’s permission) and transform it into personalized experiences with brands and retailers, said the following:

“With AI, outcomes are just some context and a prompt away. Rokt’s Transaction Moment is super crisp and memorable, but its efficacy is downstream of data, and that comes from a CDP like mParticle. 

CDPs came on hard times principally because the data they collect just isn’t that good: 

• a purchase last summer 

• a few clicks and a scroll 

• <mixed-up identity> 

• add-to-cart 

If you asked ChatGPT to interpret this first-party data and reply with what’s relevant to the user, do you think you’d get a good answer? 

This is why we [at Crosshatch] believe that real-time relevance actually needs complete user context — not first-party data or data duct-taped together via a DMP. That comes from a user bringing cross-app data with her to her favorite apps in a tap, easily activated by brands with powerful (and commodifying!) AI.”

According to this line of thinking, existing data-driven experience paradigms (CDPs, DMPs, data clean rooms, and so on) will be supplanted by AI-driven technologies that have a fuller view of the consumer and are more adept at leveraging that view to foster a personalized experience. For example, OpenAI knows a tremendous amount about me through ChatGPT (which I use for everyday queries about my car, vacation planning, adtech research, and many other things). You could imagine OpenAI partnering with brands and retailers (possibly with the addition or through technology developed by a Crosshatch) to create powerful experiences on that basis. Whether a CDP as we currently understand it needs to be involved is unclear to me, though that could merely be a question of my own ignorance (I’m a discourse guy, not a product guy). 

The imminence of this potential change is beyond me. But in the meantime, putting heads, capital, and technology together is a play for long-term relevance for a company, Rokt, that is setting out to “redefine real-time relevance.”