Ad industry dealmaking is heating up. M&A pros think these 9 companies could be the next big buyers. Nov 4, 2026, 5:00 AM PT 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."

November 2026: LEAP Implementation Guide opens, Stagwell acquires Freestar, omnicom-ipg integration wraps, and Agentic Advertising hits 51% adoption. IAB Tech Lab releases the LEAP Implementation Guide for live event advertising. Stagwell's Freestar acquisition merges buying and selling under one roof. Omnicom completes its IPG integration with 15,000 roles reduced. And the Basis survey confirms 51% of marketing organisations now use AI agents daily. Founder, Advertising Protocols November 1, 2026 The first week of November 2026 brings a dense mix of standards updates, holding company restructuring, and mounting evidence that agentic advertising is no longer experimental. Here is what happened and what it means for the protocol landscape. IAB Tech Lab releases LEAP Implementation Guide. On October 28, IAB Tech Lab published the LEAP (Live Event Ad Playbook) Implementation Guide for public comment, with feedback due by November 23, 2026. LEAP addresses a structural gap in programmatic advertising: live events generate unpredictable audience spikes that break standard forecasting and delivery models. The guide covers two APIs: * Forecasting API: Enables buyers and sellers to exchange advance information about upcoming live events, projected viewership size, demographics, and engagement signals. This lets buyers plan and price inventory before the event starts. * Concurrent Streams API: Provides near-real-time viewership signals during live events, allowing infrastructure platforms to scale capacity and bidders to adjust bids as audience size fluctuates. The guide consists of four documents and an interactive walkthrough. For ad tech teams building CTV and live streaming infrastructure, this is the first standardised approach to the "live event problem" that has plagued programmatic buying since the shift to streaming. Why it matters for protocols. LEAP sits alongside VAST 4.3 and the CTV Ad Portfolio in the IAB's streaming stack. The Forecasting API introduces a new data exchange layer between buyers and sellers that did not previously exist in OpenRTB or OpenDirect workflows. Teams building agentic buying systems should monitor this: LEAP signals are exactly the kind of structured inventory data that buyer agents need to make autonomous live-event decisions. Stagwell acquires Freestar: buying and selling under one roof. Stagwell announced on October 26 that it has acquired Freestar, a publisher monetization platform, bringing it into Stagwell's Owned Media division. The deal moves Stagwell deeper into the business of selling the media its agencies help advertisers buy. This is a notable structural shift. Historically, holding companies operated on the buy side (agencies buying media for advertisers). With Freestar, Stagwell now owns sell-side technology and publisher relationships. The deal follows a broader trend: agencies are moving closer to supply, and the line between buy-side and sell-side is blurring. For the protocol ecosystem, this matters because Freestar's technology integrates with Prebid, Google Ad Manager, and various SSPs. Any agentic buying systems Stagwell builds will now have a direct channel to publisher inventory without intermediary SSP fees - exactly the kind of vertical integration that agentic protocols like AdCP were designed to enable. NBCU takes over FreeWheel. In a related restructuring, NBCUniversal confirmed it is taking full operational control of FreeWheel, its ad tech subsidiary. The move brings closer alignment between NBCU's premium video content and its ad technology infrastructure. FreeWheel already powers ad delivery for a large share of premium CTV inventory. With tighter NBCU integration, expect FreeWheel to become a more aggressive player in agentic CTV buying - particularly given NBCU and Carat's agent-to-agent linear+streaming buy that was announced in October 2026. Omnicom-IPG integration substantially complete. One year after closing its $13.5 billion acquisition of IPG, Omnicom announced on October 22 that integration is substantially complete. Key numbers: * 15,000 roles reduced (on track with original plan) * $900 million in cost savings achieved * The combined entity is now the world's largest advertising holding company by revenue and billings (exceeding $25 billion) CEO John Wren confirmed the group has moved past most planned reductions. Analysts note the "big six" holding companies have consolidated to a "big three": Omnicom, Publicis, and a restructured WPP. For protocol adoption, the concentration of media buying power in fewer holding companies accelerates standards adoption. When Omnicom's OMNI platform integrates agentic capabilities across the combined entity, it affects a massive share of global media spend. Agentic Advertising adoption hits 51%. The Basis Technologies survey of 184 marketing professionals, published October 19, delivered the clearest adoption signal yet: | Metric | Finding | | Organisations using AI agents | **51.1%** | | Professionals using AI daily | **61.4%** (up from 33.6% the prior year) | | Top agent use: reporting/analytics | **72.3%** | | Top agent use: drafting briefs | **56.4%** | | Top agent use: media planning | **35.1%** | | Evaluating AI against defined benchmarks | Only **6.5%** | The headline: more than half of marketing organisations now use AI agents. But only 6.5% have defined benchmarks for evaluating their AI investments - a gap that standards like AAMP's agent registry and AdCP's governance framework are designed to address. Agentic standards update. Several protocol developments continued through late October into early November: * OpenProposal comment period extended to November 10 (from the original October 22 close). 60 issues were filed from 17 GitHub accounts during the initial window. * AdCP 3.3 beta is in testing, adding agent identity and authentication capabilities via Web Bot Auth. * AdCP 3.2.5 remains the latest stable release (tagged October 16). * Olyzon launched its agentic orchestration platform at Advertising Week New York on October 7, starting with CTV and extending across YouTube, social, digital audio, and DOOH. Other notable developments. Zeta Global acquires Senso - An AI-engineering company whose technology supports Zeta's generative engine optimization offering. StackAdapt expands ChatGPT ad retargeting - Advertisers running ChatGPT Ads can now retarget viewers as they move across other media environments. Apple iOS 27 privacy changes approaching - Data and ad tech vendors are preparing for the next round of tracking restrictions. Reddit launches AI campaign tools - New AI-powered advertising tools forecast campaign results and optimize spending. UK ICO issues call for evidence on agentic AI - The UK Information Commissioner's Office wants input on agentic AI and data protection compliance, with submissions due November 20. | Date | Event | Location | | Nov 3-5 | Advertising Week LATAM | Mexico City | | Nov 4-5 | Programmatic Pioneers Connect | London | | Nov 9-11 | Adweek Brandweek | Atlanta | | Nov 12 | ADWEEK House: Commerce Summit | Los Angeles | | Nov 24-25 | DMWF Europe | Amsterdam | | Dec 1-3 | Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit | Nashville | | Dec 7-10 | INMA Media Advertising Week | New York | What to watch next week. * LEAP public comment continues through November 23 - this is the time to submit feedback on the Forecasting API and Concurrent Streams API specifications. * Magnite and AppLovin Q3 earnings (November 4) will reveal how agentic buying is affecting SSP/exchange revenues. * OpenProposal comment period closes November 10 - the final OpenProposal spec will shape how agents describe what they buy and sell. * UK ICO agentic AI submissions due November 20 - the first major privacy regulator to formally examine agentic advertising compliance. LEAP Forecasting API Concurrent Streams API Stagwell Freestar Omnicom IPG Agentic Advertising AdCP 3.3 AAMP 3.0 OpenProposal Olyzon NBCU FreeWheel Zeta Global StackAdapt ChatGPT Ads IAB Tech Lab CTV Live Event Advertising Apple iOS 27 Agent-to-Agent Buy Programmatic Pioneers Connect Adweek Brandweek UK ICO Agentic AI Related Protocols