Telcos and ad tech: the media world’s messiest on-again, off-again relationship. T-Mobile’s $600 million cash swoop for outdoor ad specialist Vistart is the latest reunion in this turbulent love story.

Slated to close this spring pending approval, its ad tech’s first notable deal of the year arrives as outdoor advertising cements itself as the sector’s rising star.

What truly stands out, though, is the deja vu. The bit where hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, exchange hands only to come crashing down years later? Haven’t we seen this movie before?

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The Programmatic Marketer

How Megan Clarken plans to get Criteo out of the ad retargeting ‘box’ Read More

Criteo yesterday announced an end to its months-long search for a new CEO with the unveiling of former Dentsu Americas chief Michael Komasinski. 

He takes over the reins from Megan Clarken both as CEO and board member beginning next month in what’s likely to be a pivotal year for both the ad tech company and the broader digital media industry as a whole. 

While maintenance of the stock price is the core priority of any publicly listed company’s CEO, Komasinski’s task is a multifaceted one if he is to build on Clarken’s five-year tenure, during which time she took the company on a transformative period.

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T-Mobile has held talks to purchase Vistar Media, as the U.S.’s third-largest telco seeks to strengthen its non-traditional revenue streams by further expanding its footprint in the advertising sector, sources told Digiday.

Such discussions are understood to have taken place amid what would appear to be an ongoing sales process from Vistar Media, which is said to have fielded several inbound inquiries since late 2024, and come as parties in the space anticipate a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. 

T-Mobile and Vistar Media declined to respond to Digiday’s requests for comment, but later confirmed the deal.

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Yahoo has entered ad tech’s curation fray, focusing on supply-side intelligence tie-ups amid a host of partnership announcements as part of its Consumer Electronic Show activity.  

It’s a positioning it hopes will differentiate it from rival demand-side platforms, such as The Trade Desk, claiming its approach can help simplify the growing complexity of the programmatic ecosystem. 

In particular, Yahoo claims it will help sophisticated advertisers manage transparency challenges and supply path optimization with CTV — an intuitive key topic of conversation at CES — while granting them more control.  

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Billy (not his real name) is the kind of senior marketer who usually has a hot take for every occasion. Brand safety? He’ll unravel the industrial complex behind it. Transparency? Buckle up; he’ll spill it all.

However, when it comes to Interpublic Group’s Acxiom, Billy’s take is conspicuously missing. It’s not because he’s uninformed; he just doesn’t think IPG has offered enough answers to form an opinion worth having. 

“It [Acxiom] was always much stronger in the U.S. compared to Europe in terms of the IDs at its disposal, so there wasn’t really enough we could’ve done with them,” said Billy, who is one of IPG’s clients. “And even then, it was us pushing for it, not them [IPG].”

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Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG, announced last month, would make it the world’s largest agency-holding company, with $25 billion in annual ad revenue and over 100,000 employees.

The deal aims to generate $750 million in cost synergies, primarily by consolidating back-office functions and reducing redundancies by potentially cutting 30% of staff. A depressingly familiar page in the corporate playbook.

However, the initial pitch from IPG and Omnicom’s executive teams focused on other outcomes, such as AI and the combination of both entities’ big bets in data-enabled marketing. 

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The Holiday or Xmas Party season intuitively leads to thoughts of revelry, marking the end-of-year cadence whereby those contributing to a common cause are thanked for their efforts, and standout performers are acknowledged.

However, as many HR managers can attest, such affairs can also be fraught with liability, an experience that organizers of the AdTechChat Xmas Party Extravaganza underwent in the days after the Dec. 4 event when community divisions flared.

The event was hosted by organizers of the AdTechChat community — a series of discussion groups for industry practitioners taking place on various social channels, primarily in the form of several WhatsApp groups — and took place in The Phoenix Arts Club, London, a venue known for “cabaret & variety from drag to musical theatre, burlesque,” acts.

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In what is likely to be one of the year’s biggest media stories, Omnicom Group has announced plans to acquire The Interpublic Group of Companies in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at approximately $13 billion.

This merger is set to create the world’s largest advertising conglomerate, combining renowned agencies such as BBDO, TBWA Worldwide, and McCann Worldgroup under one umbrella, after the two entities’ respective leadership teams decided that scale is the way forward on Madison Avenue.

According to official filings, the combined entity is projected to generate annual revenues exceeding $25 billion with an adjusted EBITA of $3.9 billion and free cash flow of $3.3 billion. Individually, Omnicom’s full-year revenue for 2023 was $14.69 billion, reflecting growth of 4.1%, while IPG’s was $10.89 billion, down from $10.93 billion in 2022.

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The much-touted revival of ad tech mergers and acquisitions appears underway. Earlier this week, Experian confirmed it is buying curation firm Audigent, capping off a round of such consolidation moves in Q4.  

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As the week closed, sources told Digiday that Channel Factory, is seeking to join these ranks, with the company understood to be holding talks with potential new backers in recent weeks.

Sources consulted by Digiday estimate the company, which specializes in the brand suitability sector, could command an exit price in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Albeit it’s understood Channel Factory is characterizing its latest efforts as a bid to gain further investment, as it seeks to accelerate its growth.

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