It’s shopping season in the advertising industry, and I’m not just talking about the holidays.
After a somewhat sleepy period, the M&A market is stirring back to life, with strategic buyers loading up their carts.
In the past couple of weeks alone, Publicis Groupe completed its $2.2 billion acquisition of the data company LiveRamp; Salesforce announced a $5.7 billion deal for the customer-engagement platform Braze; India-based Affle said it’s buying fellow adtech firm Perion for $420 million; and advertising holding company Stagwell picked up Freestar, a platform that helps publishers sell their ad space.
Jay MacDonald, CEO of the investment bank Digital Capital Advisors, has a simple rule for predicting where M&A could strike next: follow the ad dollars. He pointed to areas including influencer marketing, retail media, and connected TV. He added that geography-focused acquisitions could help companies gain a larger share of wallet.
The AI boom is also causing strategic players to rethink ad businesses they may have once overlooked, said Ana Milicevic, cofounder of Sparrow Advisers.
“Adtech has been innovating with real-time decisioning, identity, and all these component parts that in a much more automated world are very relevant,” Milicevic said.
CMO Insider polled nine ad industry bankers, investors, executives, and consultants about which strategic buyers they thought could splash out on more acquisitions in the coming months. Their answers ranged from Accenture to Zeta. We’ve listed the highlights in alphabetical order.
Accenture
The consulting firm said last month it plans to spend around $5 billion on acquisitions in its 2027 financial year. Ad industry pros expect its highly acquisitive marketing services division, Accenture Song, to remain an active buyer.
Karsten Weide, principal at W Media Research, said Accenture’s recent purchases of the creator and social agency Whalar and the data firm Sagacity demonstrate its appetite for marketing technology, customer intelligence, and creative capabilities.
“Additional acquisitions could help Accenture Song assemble a more integrated marketing offering spanning data, AI, creative production, commerce, and campaign execution,” Weide said.
Adobe
Fresh off its $1.9 billion acquisition of the search engine optimization platform Semrush this year, Adobe, soon to be helmed by new CEO Anil Chakravarthy, could be on the hunt for more companies to help strengthen its marketing and creative stack.
Sanja Partalo, general partner of S4S Ventures, said Adobe’s competitive environment is getting more challenging by the day, with creative AI companies like Higgsfield, Runway, and Canva vying for its Creative Cloud customers. (Both Adobe and S4S invested in Runway’s Series E round this year.)
“As brands need to produce more content for more channels, I’d expect Adobe to keep looking for tools that connect creation to campaign execution and measurement, as well,” Partalo said. “I believe M&A is a tool they will continue to deploy to strengthen their offering.”
Havas
Holding company Havas completed eight acquisitions in the first nine months of 2026, and its CFO François Laroze said last month that additional deals could close before year-end or in early 2027.
“Publicis’ acquisition of LiveRamp increases the incentive to strengthen Havas’ data, identity, retail media, and AI capabilities, although its established strategy favors smaller, targeted acquisitions,” W Media Research’s Weide said.
Digital Capital Advisors’ MacDonald said Havas could pursue targeted acquisitions in the $50 million to $200 million range, compared with Publicis’ billion-dollar-plus deals.
Omnicom
On ad giant Omnicom’s third-quarter earnings call last month, CFO Phil Angelastro said the company is getting back into acquisition mode, having completed its $9 billion mega-merger with IPG and some disposals across its portfolio.
Industry insiders predicted retail media acquisitions could be high on Omnicom’s list of potential targets. That would bolster its Acxiom data and Flywheel commerce assets. Nick MacShane, senior managing director at the investment bank Progress Partners, described Omnicom as a company that needs “to answer other people’s M&A,” pointing to the Publicis-LiveRamp deal.
Omnicom “still lacks the commerce stack Publicis built with Epsilon, CitrusAd, and Profitero,” said Andreas Roell, CEO of the advisory firm Evros Group.
OpenAI
OpenAI is scaling its ad business at lightning speed. The company said last month that more than 100,000 advertisers had run ChatGPT ad campaigns over the eight months since its ad platform’s debut.
It’s also launched a slew of adtech integrations, including with Criteo, Kargo, Pacvue, and StackAdapt. Industry insiders said partnerships can sometimes signal that buyers are road-testing a company’s capabilities ahead of a potential acquisition.
OpenAI could move to purchase an ad-buying platform that has baked-in advertiser and agency relationships, Sparrow Advisers’ Milicevic said.
“The biggest value is the advertising know-how,” she said. “Hiring a larger team that already functions well with each other and knows how to speak to buyers, and knows what transactions are valued, can really accelerate their go-to-market.”
M&A will largely depend on what happens with OpenAI’s forthcoming initial public offering, said Joshua Wepman, a managing director within Houlihan Lokey’s technology group.
“Anything they’re working on, they’ll slow roll it with the S-1 process,” Wepman said.
Publicis
The highly acquisitive French agency group shows no signs of slowing down after buying LiveRamp, and said earlier this year it expected to resume incremental bolt-on acquisitions once that deal was completed.
Abeed Janmohamed, a partner at the advisory firm Volando Partners, said those could include companies it can use to build additional data capabilities, such as European assets that can complement Epsilon, its biggest acquisition to date at $4.4 billion.
Partalo of S4S Ventures anticipates Publicis could want to make an “agentic orchestration” play. She describes agentic orchestration as using AI agents to connect data and measurement to decisions made across advertising campaigns, from planning and audience selection through activation, optimization, and reporting.
“A capability like that could help Publicis move from giving teams better insights to helping them act on those insights across campaigns,” Partalo said.
Stagwell
Stagwell has made more than 60 acquisitions since it was founded in 2015, and hot on the heels of its Freestar deal, it’s still hungry for more.
CEO Mark Penn told Adweek in a recent interview that he’s looking at acquisitions to help the company expand further into Latin America and to “bolster our digital transformation companies and growth.”
Consultancies and agencies are increasingly competing on technical services as marketers shift budgets from campaigns into data and AI, Evros Group’s Roell said.
“I would expect midsize data engineering firms and AI implementation shops with real enterprise clients to see the most competition from buyers,” Roell said.
The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk has long been a large-M&A holdout, but as the adtech company faces a significant revenue deceleration amid fierce competition from the likes of Amazon and Google, could that change?
Though The Trade Desk’s share price has dropped dramatically since its peak, the company said in September it had about $1.5 billion in cash on its balance sheet.
Industry insiders said the company, which operates a demand-side platform (DSP), could benefit from adding retail media infrastructure, unique connected-TV inventory or monetization technology, or a solution that gives it a leg up in the agentic media-buying space.
“Any of the businesses that are workflow-oriented are going to have to do something to evolve their businesses in the agentic world,” Wepman of Houlihan Lokey said.
Digital Capital Advisors’ MacDonald said that, given The Trade Desk’s long-standing culture of “build it at home,” he believes that if the company decides to go down the M&A path, the acquisition will be big, not a tuck-in.
Zeta Global
Zeta Global’s share price has soared about 70% over the past year, as its acquisition-heavy strategy to build an all-in-one marketing platform gains momentum.
Last November, it made its biggest-ever acquisition, acquiring martech company Marigold’s enterprise software business for up to $325 million to expand Zeta’s customer base and help it corner the loyalty market.
Janmohamed said Zeta has a track record of making strategic acquisitions of companies where others may not have seen value, then quickly distributing their capabilities across its client network through the Zeta Marketing Platform and its AI agent, Athena. He expects that run to continue.
“Zeta is one to watch,” Janmohamed said.
Zeta CEO David Steinberg said the company takes a disciplined approach to acquisitions, and every opportunity must meet five strategic pillars: “Be accretive from day one, create cross-selling opportunities, add differentiated technology or data, integrate into our platform within 12 months, and bring talent that strengthens our team.”
