Deals & Moves

Cardlytics acquired card-linked offers platform Dosh for $275 million in cash + stock. Announced March 1 2021; completed March 9 2021. Cardlytics' first acquisition in its 13-year history; expanded its consumer-side rewards footprint.

AOL acquired video-ad platform Adap.tv for ~$405 million ($331M cash + $82.5M AOL stock; ~$413.8M net of cash acquired). Announced August 7 2013; closed September 5 2013. Deal anchored AOL's programmatic video stack ahead of the Verizon acquisition.

IBM acquired cloud marketing-automation company Silverpop — a deal valued at approximately $275 million per press reports — folding it into IBM’s marketing cloud in 2014.

Oracle agreed to acquire cloud marketing firm Responsys for $27.00 per share, or approximately $1.5 billion net of cash, in a deal announced December 20, 2013.

DoubleVerify agreed to acquire Berlin-based ad-verification company Meetrics in an all-cash deal to expand its media-quality measurement footprint across EMEA.

Magnite acquired CTV ad-serving platform SpringServe for approximately $31 million on July 1, 2021, net of a prior $2 million investment.

Salesforce agreed to acquire digital commerce platform Demandware for $75.00 per share — approximately $2.8 billion net of cash — announced June 1, 2016 and closed in July 2016.

Adobe acquired commerce platform Magento Commerce for $1.68 billion in cash, with the deal completing in mid-2018 to add native commerce to Adobe Experience Cloud.

Google acquired mobile advertising network AdMob for $750 million — a deal announced in November 2009 and completed in May 2010 after FTC clearance.

Salesforce agreed to acquire Slack for $26.79 cash plus 0.0776 Salesforce shares per share — an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion — announced December 1, 2020 and closed July 2021.

Adobe acquired B2B marketing engagement platform Marketo for $4.75 billion, with the deal closing on October 31, 2018 to add Marketo to Adobe Experience Cloud.

Salesforce agreed to acquire marketing-cloud company ExactTarget for $33.75 per share in cash — about $2.5 billion — announced June 4, 2013 and closed July 2013.

MiQ acquired Rocket Lab — a Miami-HQ mobile app growth hub with LatAm + Spain offices — in April 2026, integrating mobile and regional data into the MiQ Sigma platform. Unrelated to Rocket Lab USA, Inc. (NASDAQ: RKLB).

MiQ signed a March 2026 agreement to acquire only the LatAm business of Adsmovil (~150 employees, 12 markets) — creating the largest independent programmatic provider in Latin America. Adsmovil's US business remains independent under founder Alberto Pardo.

MiQ acquired Grasp in November 2023, adding pre-launch media QA and data-governance SaaS to its capability stack. Grasp continues as an independent business unit under MiQ ownership.

Publicis Groupe signed an agreement on May 17, 2026 to acquire data-collaboration platform LiveRamp for $2.2B enterprise value ($38.50/share, all cash). Deal expected to close before year-end 2026, subject to regulatory + shareholder approval.

The deal that created modern ad tech: Google's acquisition of DoubleClick gave it the buy-side ad-server stack and the foundation for what became Google Ad Manager + DV360.

Microsoft's biggest-ever ad-tech bet — buying aQuantive (parent of Atlas + Avenue A | Razorfish + DrivePM) to compete with Google's DoubleClick deal. Wrote off $6.2B in 2012.

The defining dot-com merger: AOL acquired Time Warner in an all-stock deal at peak dot-com valuations. Considered one of the worst mergers in corporate history.

Yahoo's second video-programmatic bet. BrightRoll became Yahoo's programmatic video DSP. Eventually folded into Verizon Media.

Microsoft's biggest acquisition. LinkedIn's 433M-user professional graph became core to Microsoft's B2B + recruitment + advertising strategy.

After 20 months of antitrust review, AT&T closed the Time Warner deal — added HBO + Warner Bros + Turner to the DirecTV + Xandr stack.

Identity resolution becomes a structural layer — Acxiom's LiveRamp acquisition made onboarding offline data into digital ads a packaged product. LiveRamp later spun out as standalone in 2018.

Marissa Mayer's big bet on a younger user base. Yahoo wrote down most of the value in 2016; sold to Automattic in 2019 for ~$3M.