advertising-technology
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The Holding Company That Invented the Holding Company - Then Joined One
IPG spent six decades proving that rival agencies could prosper under one roof. Then data, platforms and media scale rewrote the bargain - and the inventor of the modern agency holding company became part of an even larger one.
Blavity Built a Media Company - Then Learned the Real Product Was Access
A newsletter for overlooked stories became a portfolio reaching culture, careers, conferences and connected TV. Blavity's useful lesson is not “build an audience” - it is what to build after the audience trusts you.
Innovid’s $500 Million Reset: How a Video-Ads Startup Became the Pipes Behind Streaming TV
It began with clickable video, survived the messy birth of connected TV, and learned that the best business in advertising may be the part viewers never notice. Now, inside Mediaocean, Innovid is betting that neutral infrastructure plus AI can outmaneuver the walled gardens.
The $8.7 Billion Media Buyer Betting Its Edge Is an Open Door
Horizon Media became one of America’s largest media agencies without joining a global holding company. Now it is trying to prove that independence can be more than an ownership detail - it can be a product strategy.
The Bus Shelter That Became a Global Media Machine
JCDecaux turned a piece of civic furniture into a 60-year business model. Now its hardest trick is making a million physical advertising panels behave like software without making cities feel like websites.
The Billboard Learned to Count: Clear Channel's Bet on Measurable Attention
Clear Channel Outdoor still rents rectangles beside roads and inside airports. But the more revealing business is the machinery behind them - audience data, automated buying and proof that a physical ad did something.
Perion Network
The Israeli adtech company spent a decade buying its way across every screen. Now, after Microsoft pulled the rug on its search business, Perion is betting the whole company on one AI platform - and on the screens Google can't own.
DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify turned a basic question - did a real person see the ad? - into a global measurement business. Now its software is moving beyond policing impressions to steering campaigns, just as Nielsen prepares to take it private.
The Brandtech Group
The Brandtech Group is a marketing technology holding company built to help the world's largest brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology - and, increasingly, generative AI. Founded by former Havas CEO David Jones in 2015 as 'You & Mr Jones,' it has grown through a string of acquisitions into a digital-only group of roughly 7,000 people across 40+ countries, spanning in-housing agency Oliver, performance-media group Jellyfish, and its flagship generative-AI ad platform Pencil Pro. Clients include eight of the world's ten largest advertisers, and after a $115M Series C in 2024 the group was valued at about $4 billion.
The Brief
The Brief is an AI marketing platform that runs the full advertising campaign lifecycle - discovering competitor and market signals, creating ads at scale, launching them across channels, and optimizing performance - through a system of four AI agents. Formerly the ad-design tool Creatopy, the company rebranded to The Brief in October 2025 to position itself as an 'AI agency' for in-house marketing teams and agencies, and reports nearly 10,000 brands using the platform.
Veridooh
Veridooh is an Australian adtech company and the global leader in independent out-of-home (OOH) advertising verification. Its patented SmartCreative technology collects ad-play-level data without relying on media owner systems, letting brands and agencies independently track, measure and verify static, digital and programmatic OOH campaigns across 400+ metrics in a single platform. Founded in Sydney in 2019 by Mo Moubayed and Jeremy Yang, Veridooh works with global brands including Google, Amazon, Unilever and McDonald's, and is the preferred verification partner for major agency groups including IPG Mediabrands, Omnicom and WPP Media in Australia.
Xperi Inc.
Xperi Inc. (NYSE: XPER) is a San Jose-based entertainment technology company whose work hides in plain sight inside the devices people already own. Through its DTS, HD Radio, TiVo and IMAX Enhanced brands, Xperi puts immersive sound in living rooms, smart software on televisions, broadcast and streaming radio in cars, and personalized discovery across pay-TV and IPTV platforms. Spun out of Xperi Holding Corp in 2022 as the product-focused half of the business, the company now reaches hundreds of millions of devices worldwide while pivoting its growth toward a media platform built around TiVo OS and the connected car.