U of Digital Newsletter - 10/9/24 (free)

October 2nd-October 8th

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. We have some signficant Google updates. But first: another major industry acquisition we must break down!

Check out the recording + deck from U of Digital’s LIVE LEARNING EVENT: TikTok Ban? Google Breakup? Where Will Ad Budgets Go?

In this session, we covered:

• Just how much money could be up for grabs?

• How should advertisers and agencies think strategically about re-allocating their ad dollars?

• If a bunch of money goes up for grabs, which platforms are likely to be the biggest winners? How can you position your platform to be a winner?

With special guests Brian Wieser, CFA and Olivia Morley of Madison and Wall. CLICK HERE TO ACCESS.

Top Stories 👁️ 

Zeta Global to Buy Marketing Tech Company LiveIntent in $250M Deal
Source: The Wall Street Journal
October 8th, 2024

Summary: Marketing cloud Zeta Global adds to its data arsenal with the deal for LiveIntent, which was historically an email marketing platform that expanded to offer a wider range of services, including helping publishers resell ads in their email newsletters and leverage an ID solution to improve ad monetization. Zeta will integrate LiveIntent's identity graph, which is based on 235M hashed email addresses, into the Zeta Data Cloud to expand its identity resolution capabilities. The acquisition also helps Zeta break into publisher monetization. LiveIntent's publisher network includes more than 2,000 premium media companies, including eight of the 10 largest publishers ranked by Comscore. 

Zeta plans to integrate LiveIntent's tech into its marketing platform within six months. The deal consists of $77.5M in cash and $172.5M in common stock at closing sometime in Q4. But there is also an opportunity for a earn-out of 50% cash, 50% stock if LiveIntent hits its margin expansion targets from 2025-2027.

Zeta, a legacy CRM company which bolted on the remains of the Sizmek DSP and DMP (formerly RocketFuel), among other acquisitions, went public in 2021 at a $1.7B valuation. 

Deal Grades:
Zeta Global: B
LiveIntent: A-

Opinion: In the face of cookie deprecation and more broadly, signal loss, first-party data is the name of the game! Zeta already has a ton of it from advertisers, who use Zeta’s CRM technology to house their first-party data. Now it brings in a treasure trove of first-party data from publishers as well, in addition to publisher data it already accesses through its social commenting platform, Disqus. 

There are walled gardens with their own, unique data. Let’s put them aside for a moment. Given Zeta is not a publisher and is an independent tech company, let’s consider their strategy versus other indie tech companies from a 30,000 foot perspective. 

There are indie ad tech companies that onboard data from publishers and advertisers to facilitate programmatic transactions (e.g. Magnite, The Trade Desk). These companies don’t have any unique access to data.

There are other indie tech companies that have “deeper” data relationships with advertisers (e.g., Salesforce, Epsilon) AND / OR publishers (e.g., LiveRamp, Quantcast), which gives them some level of unique access to data, and SOME of them also have activation platforms.

With this acquisition, Zeta will have “deeper” data relationships with BOTH sides (CRM for advertisers, newsletter monetization and identity for publishers), PLUS an activation platform (Zeta DSP), which will put it in quite a unique position. Check out our KnowledgeScape^TM below, which depicts how Zeta + LiveIntent is placed:

It paid a pretty penny for LiveIntent, but Zeta now has the potential to offer a future-proof, data-rich platform that can generate tons of value for the industry from a planning, activation, identity, measurement, analytics, and monetization standpoint. 

We’ll see if they can realize their full potential!

Paid Subscribers See ALL The Digital Advertising News.

Thank you for reading the U of Digital Newsletter.
Continue reading by upgrading.

That’s It For This Week 👋

The U of Digital Weekly Newsletter is intended for subscribers, but occasional forwarding is okay!

To subscribe visit Uof.Digital/Newsletters or contact us directly for group subscriptions.

And remember, U of Digital helps teams drive better outcomes through structured education on critical topics like programmatic, privacy / identity, CTV, commerce media, AI, and more. Interested in learning more about how we can supercharge your team?