Progress Perspective: What is the Significance of the Adobe-TubeMogul Deal?

November 14, 2016 ? Progress Partners’ MacShane, founder and senior managing director, responded when asked to comment on the Adobe-TubeMogul deal after news broke earlier this month.

There have been lots of big ad tech deals this year: Verizon’s $4.8 billion for Yahoo!, Chinese Orient Hontai Capital?s $1.4 billion for majority acquisition of Applovin, Salesforce’s $700 million for Krux and now Adobe’s $540 million for TubeMogul etc. What is driving those deals? Is this the long awaited consolidation? What comes next?

MacShane posited “most leading incumbents, whatever their category, are aggressively looking for tangential acquisitions that expand their scope of offering to existing and incremental customer bases. VZ-YHOO is the marriage of content and distribution, giving VZ over 600M MUV digital users and bona fide video ad stack. CRM-Krux was about snatching up the remaining scaled independent DMP left on the market (following Nielsen-Exelate).

“So yes we are seeing ?consolidation’, but each deal falls under a distinct rationale ? if there?s any broad correlation, it?s that establish players are putting capital to work on the impetus that they may lose out. If leading players show they are in-market and willing to be aggressive with transformative cross?category deals, then others match that behavior. The current deal market could be explained in this way.

“That said, ADBE-TUBE is even more significant. The marriage of ADBE-TUBE is a step across a demarcation line that has until now existed between leading enterprise marketing cloud providers and the digital ad monetization sector. By acquiring a leading video ad monetization platform, ADBE moves from just Owned & Earned into Paid Media, something contemplated, but not yet pursued by peers ORCL and IBM. Notably, SAP has built and launched Exchange Media (SAPXM) this year, moving into demand-side monetization organically rather than inorganically.”

For more about the Adobe-TubeMogul deal, read the Digiday article here:  http://ow.ly/wyrJ306o04r