This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →The ad tech public era is over. Not literally, of course. A handful of scaled, still-growing platforms remain public. There just aren’t many of them, and the slower-growth, utility-margin names are dropping out one by one. Nielsen agreed to buy DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion in cash last week (August 6), taking it private less than a year after its biggest rival, Integral Ad Science, went the same route last December in a roughly $2 billion deal with Novacap. LiveRamp is next off the board, headed for a Publicis-owned exit from the New York market by year end. Criteo, coming off a 14% revenue decline, is now in active take-private talks with Vista Equity Partners.
That’s four sizable delistings inside a year, if Criteo closes — a clear signal of where ad tech sits right now.
Gone are the days when investors got themselves in a tizzy over ad networks, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms on their own merits. Now they’re more likely to have their heads in their hands, or worse. The Trade Desk grew revenue just 3% in its second quarter, versus 19% a year earlier, and subsequently lost more than 20% of its value. CEO Jeff Green admitted the quarter “did not meet the standard we set for ourselves”. AppLovin, meanwhile, grew revenue 53% and still hit a 52-week low on a modest miss. Teads suspended its third quarter guidance entirely after a 17% decline.
