Who Actually Owns Your Media Options?

Ad tech consolidation isn’t new, the industry’s been buying, selling, and combining platforms for years. But a few recent moves are worth pausing on, because consolidation doesn’t just change who owns what. It changes how you access inventory, use data, and ultimately decide where your money goes.

Taboola just locked up an exclusive deal to represent NBC News’ web display inventory programmatically. Publicis is closing its $2.2 billion LiveRamp acquisition and just picked up Influential too. Ari Paparo connected these to a good historical example: WPP’s investment in AppNexus, which he says was widely seen as dooming that company’s DSP strategy.

Same mechanism both times. Ownership changes incentives. Once an agency, holding company, or other major player has a stake in a piece of technology, competitors start thinking differently about using it. Even if the product itself hasn’t changed., the relationships around it have.

We’re watching the same thing play out with inventory now. Once Taboola exclusively represents NBC News’ web display inventory, advertisers who want it have exactly one path to get there. One deal doesn’t reshape the open internet. But stack enough of these up and it’s worth asking how many real options you actually have to reach the inventory you want.

None of this makes consolidation bad. Bringing pieces of the ecosystem together can make buying simpler, move data more easily between systems, and cut down on how many partners you have to manage just to reach an audience. The real question isn’t whether consolidation is good or bad, it’s whether you understand how it’s changing the incentives behind your own media decisions:

• Who owns the technology you’re using?
• Who controls the inventory you’re buying?
• Is there a financial relationship somewhere influencing where your budget goes?
• If those relationships change, how easily could you move?

That last one is the whole game. You don’t need to avoid big platforms or consolidated tech, plenty of the time that’s exactly where you should be investing. But you need enough control to make that call yourself: own your data and your accounts, have measurement that works the same way across every platform, and be able to compare opportunities against the same business outcomes instead of whatever each platform wants to show you.

The best platform today won’t necessarily be the best one two years from now, and every acquisition, partnership, and exclusive inventory deal moves that line a little further. As ad tech consolidates, flexibility stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the advantage.

That’s basically the whole philosophy behind how we run things at Delve Deeper. We’re not tied to one platform, we work across them and choose where to invest based on what actually makes sense for each advertiser. If something’s working, we lean into it. If it stops, or something better shows up, we move. The more the industry consolidates, the more that flexibility is worth, and it’s the reason we built the business this way. 

Want to learn more?

If you’re thinking about how ad tech consolidation could affect your media strategy, or simply want to make sure you have the flexibility to move as the landscape changes, reach out to reach out to Rich Holland at rich.holland@delvedeeper.com and the Delve Deeper team.