February 26th-March 4th // Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. More bleak earnings and more exciting deals!

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Top Stories 👁️ 

DoubleVerify to acquire Rockerbox in $85M deal
Source: Axios
February 26th, 2025

Summary: DoubleVerify, a brand safety and verification vendor, aims to enhance its ad measurement and optimization capabilities with this deal. Launched in 2013, Rockerbox started as a demand-side platform (DSP) but pivoted to brand safety, media measurement (MMM), and analytics tools for direct-to-consumer and other brands. Rockerbox offers a product that unifies multi-touch attribution, marketing mix modeling, and testing into a single view of marketing performance, according to its website. DV will integrate Rockerbox's data with its own before processing it all through Scibids, an ad optimization platform DV purchased in 2023.

The all-cash deal is expected to close in Q2. DV will add Rockerbox's 50 employees to its 1,000-person team. Rockerbox, which was founded by AppNexus vets Ron Jacobson and Patrick O'Toole, previously raised some funding from angel investors but was largely bootstrapped.

Deal Grades:
DoubleVerify: A+
Rockerbox: B+

Opinion: In a recent newsletter, we said this about ad verification companies: “Speaking of solving bigger and better problems, these companies should be looking to grow into areas like media measurement, fraud detection, identity / addressability, ad serving, and more.”

They did it! We love to see it! Bravo! So now when they’re done cleaning up all of the web’s brand safety issues, they can move on to bigger and better things, like measurement!

Seriously though, it’s great to see DoubleVerify move aggressively into media measurement with this acquisition. They are well-equipped to do it; brand safety / suitability is already a form of media measurement. But instead of just measuring “what’s bad,” they can now start measuring “what’s good.” That will create a huge shift in how they are perceived, the value they are providing to the ecosystem, and, most importantly, their incentives. Now, they don’t need rampant brand safety issues to exist as a business that they have to clean up all the time. This acquisition gives the company balance.

Also, Rockerbox was the last noteworthy attribution company on the market. Attribution being pixel-based, user-level measurement of ads. And even they had pivoted by adding more strategic, contribution-based measurement approaches (e.g., MMM) to their suite in recent years. 

Attribution as the single source of truth for smart marketers is dead. 

The Last of Q4 Earnings

Magnite (👎): Revenue was up 4% to $194M, missing estimates. The sell-side platform touted its CTV business, which outperformed expectations, but its display, video, and OOH business only grew modestly in Q4 (though it has since rebounded). Shares fell 6% in after-hours trading.

Pubmatic (👎): Revenue was up 1% to $85.5M, missing estimates. The SSP said Q4 CTV revenue more than doubled, now representing more than 20% of total revenue. Strength in its underlying business helped offset soft spend from a large DSP (DV360, according to AdExchanger), which switched to first-price auctions. Shares fell 11% in after-hours trading (and even more the next day).

Integral Ad Science (👍): Revenue was up 14% to $153M, beating estimates. The brand safety and verification vendor promoted new integrations with Meta, Reddit, DV360, Lumen Research, and others. Shares rose 5%.

DoubleVerify (👎): Revenue was up 11% to $190M, missing estimates. The brand safety and verification vendor touted strong CTV measurement in 2024 (up 95%), supply-side revenue (up 34%), and its Rockerbox deal. Shares fell nearly 15% in after-hours trading (and even more the next day). 

Viant (🤷): Revenue was up 40% to $90M, beating estimates. That's a record for Viant but also presumably includes revenue from its IRIS.TV deal, which closed in November. The DSP said CTV spend hit an 'all-time high' and highlighted its Lockr acquisition (see more on this below). Shares fell 11% in after-hours trading (and even more on Tuesday).

Zeta Global (🤷): Revenue was up 50% to $315M. That's Zeta's highest growth rate ever but also presumably includes revenue from its LiveIntent deal, which closed in October. Zeta touted its plans to reach $2B in 2028 revenue. Shares were flat in after-hours trading.

Taboola (👎): Revenue was up 17% to $491M, beating estimates. The native ad company launched Realize, a performance platform that goes beyond search and social, and a $200M share repurchase expansion. But Q1 and 2025 guidance appears to have missed expectations. Shares fell by double digits.

Outbrain (👎): Revenue was down 5% to $234.6M, missing estimates. DSP ad spend increased 45%. Outbrain completed its Teads acquisition and will begin operating under the Teads banner.  The company expects $65M-$75M in synergies by 2026. Shares fell 8%.

WPP (👎): Organic revenue was down 1%, missing expectations. The agency holding company cited a soft Chinese market and uncertainty in the U.S. WPP predicts 2025 organic revenue to be flat to negative 2%. Shares fell 16%.

Stagwell (👎): Organic net revenue growth was up 10%. The challenger agency holding company predicts 2025 organic growth of 5.5%-7.5%, excluding advocacy, which will nosedive after a big 2024 bump. Moving forward, Stagwell will no longer provide organic growth guidance, focusing instead on total growth. Shares fell 5%.

Paramount (👎): Revenue was up 5% to $7.98B, missing estimates. Paramount+, with 77.5M subscribers, was a bright spot with Q4 revenue up 16% and domestic profitability expected in 2025. The Skydance merger is expected to close in the first half of 2025. Shares fell 2% in extended trading.

Warner Bros. Discovery (🤷): Revenue was down 2% to $10B, missing estimates. Streaming performance was strong, with revenue up 5% to $2.65B. Max added 6.4M subscribers, reaching 116.9M. WBD predicts 150M global subscribers by the end of 2026. Shares rose 11%.

Opinion: Yikes, the market reaction to these earnings has been brutal. It’s hard to ignore all the earnings misses, but it's just as hard to tell how much of the stock slump is due to earnings versus the broader market downturn caused by Trump’s tariffs.

Other Notable Headlines ✍️

MNTN to Sell Stake in Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort - CTV ad platform MNTN is divesting Maximum Effort, a digital marketing and creative agency founded by actor Ryan Reynolds and producer George Dewey in 2018, to "an affiliate of its original owner," according to an SEC filing. It's not clear if that means the affiliate is Reynolds, Dewey, or some other company, but the deal is expected to close on April 1. MNTN acquired Maximum Effort in 2021 for an undisclosed price tag but recorded a $13.5M goodwill charge for the deal. Maximum Effort is known for crafting ad creative for brands like Match.com, as well as Reynolds-owned properties like Aviation Gin, Mint Mobile, and Wrexham AFC. Even after the divestiture, it will continue providing creative services to MNTN.

In the SEC filing, MNTN also said that it plans to file for an IPO trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker MNTN. The company's 2024 revenue was up 28% to $225.57M, helping MNTN reduce its net loss by 38% to $32.88M. So timing for an IPO may be good (check out Marketecture’s write-up on the company’s IPO prospects).

Perhaps divesting Maximum Effort allows the company to better position itself as a pure tech-play IPO with a higher multiple?

Viant Acquires Lockr, And It’s All About Connecting IDs - Launched in 2021, Lockr has solutions that let consumers manage their consent and online identities and sell-side tech that helps publishers with identity and first-party data management. This deal is a head-scratcher for some analysts, who question why publishers would want to give their data directly to a DSP, which generally represents advertiser interests. In its earnings call with investors, where the deal was announced, Viant executives explained that it wants to add Lockr's publisher tech identity data to its identity graph, reducing friction in matching the Viant Household ID with publisher identity. Viant is also banking on Lockr helping expand adoption of its ID solutions in programmatic buys. This is Viant's second acquisition in the last six months; in November, it bought IRIS.TV, another sell-side business that is part of Viant’s Direct Access product, which helps advertisers work directly with publishers without an SSP. 

Is Viant quietly building an ‘independent walled garden’ of sorts by acquiring unique data tech—positioning itself as an enticing, in-between alternative to the consumer-facing walled gardens and the pure-play, agnostic DSPs like The Trade Desk?

More than 1 billion people are now watching podcasts on YouTube every month - Already the world's largest video platform, it appears that YouTube has also become the largest platform for podcasts. People watched over 400M hours of podcasts on living-room devices, according to YouTube. YouTube is the preferred service for 31% of weekly podcast listeners, even more than Spotify (27%), which has 675M monthly active users. We should note that the Google Podcasts app was phased out last year; apparently, people prefer to watch their podcasts instead! YouTube CEO Neal Mohan plans to introduce more tools to support podcasters, improve creator monetization, and improve discovery. It is also going to make it easier for YouTube users to subscribe to other streaming services and let creators display their videos in “seasons,” like episodic shows.

Amazon Is Pitching a Tool That Automates Big Parts of Running TV Ads🔒 - Amazon's new Complete TV product within Amazon DSP helps advertisers manage their linear and streaming TV budgets, track upfront commitments, and buy scatter TV inventory. The tool gets a hand from AI, which can assist in tracking upfront commitment pacing, identifying the best platforms for scatter inventory, and recommend where advertisers should invest to reach their desired audiences across TV and the open web. Amazon says Complete TV can measure reach and frequency so advertisers can avoid wasting money on showing ads to the same people too many times. The tool is currently in beta and will be available to all advertisers in the upcoming 2025-2026 upfront season. To attract advertisers, Amazon is waiving fees for programmatic guaranteed deals on its own properties and charging only a 1% fee for deals with other streamers. The tool is yet another move to get advertisers to consolidate their spend on Amazon DSP.

Sources: T-Mobile has held talks to buy location-based ad startup Blis🔒 - It sounds like Blis is pretty close to being acquired by T-Mobile in a deal that would value the UK-based location ad tech company at around $200M.  Blis, a pioneer in location-based targeting, has raised more than $35M since its founding in 2004. Blis has reportedly been soliciting offers since the end of last year; not surprisingly, PE firms have been in the mix of potential buyers. T-Mobile now appears to be the frontrunner, weeks after it paid $600M for out-of-home specialist Vistar Media. While most telcos have backed away from ad tech, T-Mobile is doubling down—seemingly aiming to dominate the digital out-of-home space.

AppLovin shares tumble as short sellers question its centerpiece AXON ad software - Short sellers Fuzzy Panda and Culper Research alleged that AppLovin is using shady practices with its AI-powered platform AXON, sending AppLovin’s shares down 12%. For example, they claim that AppLovin is stealing data from Meta and exploiting app permissions, among other transgressions. The reports followed AppLovin's stellar Q4 earnings and news that it would sell off its mobile gaming segment and expand AXON to other e-commerce sectors. AppLovin's stock has been a major ad tech success story in the public market, surging over 700% in 2024. AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi issued a lengthy statement in response to the reports, accusing the short sellers of trying to drive down AppLovin's stock price for their own gain.

Maybe the truth is somewhere in between?

Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓 

Disney Sells Out Ad Inventory for 97th Oscars Ahead of Show's Streaming Debut🔒 - Disney sold out its 30-second ad slots for the Oscars at $1.7M–$2.3M each. But thanks to overly blunt keyword blocklists, advertisers ended up blocking 56% of Oscars-related content online! Disappointing.

Firsthand raises $26M for brand agents - Founded by DoubleClick alums Jonathan Heller and Michael Rubenstein, Firsthand just secured $26M to help marketers and publishers build AI-powered brand agents.

​​Publishers No Longer Need To Wonder If They’re On MFA Blocklists - The Brand Safety Institute has a nifty new tool that will show if publisher domains are currently listed on made-for-advertising (MFA) blocklists.

VideoAmp Adds Disney, Fox, Paramount to Planning Tool Using First-Party Streaming Data - VideoAmp’s new VXP tool gives advertisers a cross-platform view of media consumption, leveraging first-party streaming data from Disney, Fox, and Paramount.

IPG Sells R/GA to Private Equity Firm and Agency Leaders🔒- IPG is offloading R/GA to private equity firm Truelink Capital, along with global CEO Robin Forbes and chief creative officer Tiffany Rolfe, who are taking the agency private.

Google Ads stop running for some advertisers - Some advertisers saw Google Ads go dark from March 1st–3rd due to an outage.

Google, Amazon, Others Respond to Senators’ Inquiry About Funding CSAM Via Ads🔒- After reports of ads appearing on a site hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), Big Tech scrambled for damage control—Amazon issued refunds, and Google blocked ads on the site.

Snap Launches New Brand Suitability Suite for Advertisers - Snap is leaning into brand safety as other platforms back away. 

Meta plans to release standalone Meta AI app in effort to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT - Meta is set to launch its standalone AI app in Q2, joining Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It’s also rolling out 'Business AI,' a tool for brands to build AI-powered customer engagement agents.

Max Pulls CNN and Sports From Ad Tier in Streaming Pivot - Warner Bros. Discovery is yanking CNN and sports from Max’s ad-supported tier—forcing ad-free subscribers to pay extra.

MLB and ESPN Split Reveals What's On Deck Amid TV's Streaming Shift - ESPN and MLB are parting ways after the 2025 season—setting the stage for a streaming giant with deep pockets to swoop in.

Skype is shutting down after two decades - After two decades, Microsoft is finally closing Skype—it’ll shut down in May. You’ll finally be able to close Skype, too.

That’s It For This Week 👋

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