Media and advertising could be rocked by some crazy deals in 2019 - including AT&T buying Roku and Google buying LiveRamp
- Advertising and media witnessed a flurry of M&A activity in 2018, a trend that will continue gaining steam in 2019, according to a new Forrester report.
- AT&T will buy Roku and Google will acquire LiveRamp in 2019, according to the report, changing the TV landscape and shocking marketing cloud stalwarts and agency holding companies.
- While acquiring Roku helps AT&T embed itself more deeply in the lives of consumers, acquiring LiveRamp makes Google more invincible than ever.
2018 was a blockbuster year for M&A activity in media, with AT&T lapping up both Time Warner and AppNexus, and Comcast acquiring Sky.
And you shouldn't expect the flurry of activity to die down any time soon.
The media industry will continue to be disrupted in 2019 with several new deals shaking up the space, according to a new report by market research firm Forrester.
"We feel that there are specific events that will take place in 2019 - specifically around further M&A," Collin Colburn, B2C marketing analyst at Forrester, told Business Insider. "Our predictions are grounded in the trends and events from this year, and the needs of technology companies, media conglomerates, and marketers."
Here are the deals that could shake up the media and advertising industries in 2019:
AT&T's next big move could be going after Roku
With Time Warner, AppNexus, and DirectTV under its belt, AT&T seems to have content, ad tech, and distribution figured out. But all this still isn't enough to help it transform into a digital media and marketing powerhouse and take on the Facebook-Google duopoly, according to Forrester.
That's because AT&T is still not plugged into consumers' daily lives the way that Facebook and Google are. And one way around that could be to invest in a content platform, according to Forrester. Such a move would enable AT&T to not only grab a more central role in consumers' lives, but also a bigger share of their 42-hour-per-week video entertainment viewing habit.
As AT&T looks to compete for more market share in advertising, Roku could be an attractive target.
The argument, according to Forrester, is simple: Roku has a massive (and rapidly growing) user base of 20 million, which when added to DirectTV's 20 million households, gives AT&T greater scale than any other TV-centric media company.
Plus, Roku captures a lot of detailed data about over-the-top TV (OTT) viewing, and can dynamically insert targeted ads into its videos, which would perfectly complement AT&T's new targeted advertising division, Xandr.
AT&T clearly is ready and willing to wage war against today's current duopoly over advertising dollars, Colburn said.
"Buying Roku is a natural next step for AT&T after their acquisitions of Time Warner and AppNexus in 2018," he said. "The combination of the biggest audience, with massive data, and a tech-stack that enables precision-targeting anchored in quality video content is a highly appealing proposition to advertisers."
And Google could snap up LiveRamp
Ever since data-marketing giant Acxiom sold its marketing solutions platform to ad holding company IPG this summer, all eyes have turned to LiveRamp, Acxiom's other big business.
LiveRamp helps brands link their data with real people, and industry experts consider its data onboarding practice second to none. With the industry being increasingly plagued by regulatory concerns, LiveRamp becomes a highly critical asset for any adtech or martech vendor.
This will lead to a huge bidding war for LiveRamp, according to Forrester. The likes of Adobe and Salesforce will attempt to counter holding companies like Dentsu Aegis Network that will seek to complement LiveRamp's data with Merkle's M1 data platform.
But Forrester thinks the ultimate winner will be Google, which will outbid everyone with its trove of cash, making LiveRamp's data available for customers using its newly branded and consolidated adtech stack, Google Marketing Platform.
LiveRamp offers Google enhanced connectivity to the digital world outside of itself, an expanded - and perhaps mutually beneficial - relationship with publishers as well as a unique set of data and identity assets, Colburn said, making it mightier than ever.
"If Google acquires LiveRamp, it will make its new Marketing Platform all the more powerful and enticing for marketers that have already been using some of Google's legacy tools," he said. "With these acquisitions, the big keep getting bigger."