💥 AdTech & Martech M&A Chugging Right Along
The AdTech landscape is shifting fast—and 2024’s momentum is accelerating in 2025 with massive M&A signals that the future of advertising is being re-architected now.
Today, WPP/GroupM acquired Infosum, making a major bet on data clean rooms and privacy-first collaboration. Just days prior, T-Mobile’s Ad Network scooped up Blis, one of the leading location-based activation platforms. The message is clear: the battleground is no longer just media—it’s the data infrastructure behind it.
Let’s break this down 👇
🧱 Data Clean Rooms Are No Longer a “Nice-to-Have”
Infosum’s valuation reflects the market’s belief that clean room infrastructure is foundational in a cookieless, consent-driven world. As brands, agencies, and publishers look to safely collaborate on audience insights, clean rooms are becoming the core operating layer of data-driven marketing.
But infrastructure is just one side of the coin...
⚡ Activation Platforms Are the Next Layer of Differentiation
T-Mobile’s acquisition of Blis shows that AdNetworks—and major media players—are moving quickly to own not just identity and insights, but how and where those insights are activated. Brands want to turn their first-party data into performance across mobile, CTV, and digital—in real time.
What’s becoming clear is that:
🔍 Identity & Enrichment: The “Who” and “What” Still Matter
We’re also seeing steady movement in identity resolution and data enrichment. Companies like Audience Acuity, LiveRamp, Experian, TransUnion, and Neustar are being pulled deeper into clean rooms and activation platforms as brands demand persistent IDs and scalable enrichment across ecosystems.
Identity isn't dead—it’s evolving to work within new privacy rails.
🤖 And Then There’s AI…
Everything above is foundational—but AI is the multiplier. We’re moving from “data-driven” to AI-guided.
☁️ Enter the Data Clouds: The New Marketing Operating System
All of this transformation is powered by the massive rise of the Data Cloud.
Platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, and Google Cloud are the backbone enabling scalable, secure, and interoperable marketing data stacks. They are replacing the black-box CDPs of the 2010s with open, composable architectures.
It’s no coincidence that Infosum’s clean room architecture and Blis’s location data can plug directly into these cloud environments—and that’s exactly where players like GrowthLoop, Hightouch, and others are stepping in to enable fast, compliant activation.
🔮 The Future of AdTech Is an AI-Driven, Cloud-Native Data Stack
We're seeing the rise of a new marketing stack—one that is:
✅ Privacy-first ✅ Cloud-native ✅ AI-powered ✅ Activation-ready
The companies that win in this space won’t just deliver impressions—they’ll deliver intelligent orchestration of the customer journey, from clean room to channel.
Stay tuned. The infrastructure wars have just begun.