The debate about whether the open web is dying tends to obscure something probably more helpful...where is investment moving?
Recent transactions have concentrated on identity, measurement, data collaboration and decision support. In August 2026, Nielsen agreed to acquire DoubleVerify for approximately $2.15 billion. Publicis agreed in May to acquire LiveRamp for $2.167 billion in enterprise value. Integral Ad Science was taken private by Novacap in December 2025 at an enterprise value of approximately $1.9 billion.
Together, the three transactions represent about $6.2 billion. Each has its own rationale, but the pattern is worth examining. Buyers are investing in capabilities that help organisations connect data, assess media and inform allocation decisions.
Follow the capability, not the category
Advertising has traditionally distributed intelligence across many companies. Agencies plan. Data companies describe audiences. Verification providers assess inventory. Buying platforms optimise transactions. Measurement providers evaluate results.
Artificial intelligence makes it easier to combine those inputs into a recommendation. As that happens, value may move from providing an isolated signal towards interpreting several signals and turning them into a decision.
Publicis offers one public example. It has described its acquisitions of LiveRamp, Lotame and AdgeAI in terms of data connection, identity, prediction and business outcomes. Other holding companies have also announced investments in analytics, automation and marketing technology.
None of this proves that these combinations will produce better client outcomes. However, they do show where buyers believe strategic capability may develop.
Identity, data, measurement, prediction, decisioning and activation are increasingly being assembled as one operating system.
A large market can still consolidate
The open web can remain economically substantial while the technology layer around it becomes more concentrated. Consumers will continue visiting independent publishers, advertisers will continue valuing those audiences and those publishers with differentiated content and data will retain commercially important.
The strategic initiative clearly, to me, relies on capabilities that are useful but easily incorporated into a broader product. A specialist can remain valuable when its evidence, data or workflow is genuinely differentiated but it will become more exposed when their customers can obtain a comparable capability as part of a wider system.
I'm not suggesting that any category in today's adtech soup disappears imminently...yet. Buyers executing buys still require scale, latency, auction technology, integrations and financial infrastructure. The change is that execution may increasingly receive an instruction formed elsewhere.
The competition is moving upstream
Adtech still compares companies inside familiar boxes: DSPs, SSPs, data providers and measurement companies. To be clear these all remain functionally useful, but in their legacy guise they do little to manage who influences the investment decision.
Winners in the far far adtech future (2027) will be those that help the buyer understand the opportunity, compare alternatives and decide where money should go. That system may sit inside an agency, platform, publisher or independent specialist.
Recent mergers and acquisitions by themselves aren't a slam dunk on the direction of the market. But...they provide evidence that decision intelligence is becoming a strategic asset. I’d continue to watch the capabilities being assembled (here: https://goodeconsultancy.com/agency-index), the customer workflow they support and whether the combined proposition produces measurable outcomes. Thats where the money is.