Thursday, May 24, 2007

M&A in the Digital Ad Sector is Smoking Hot; Here's Your Handy Future-Take-Out List

Jason Jones: The digital advertising industry consolidation continues. Interestingly, most of the acquisitions have been cash deals. Why aren't the big guys using their pricey stocks? Maybe the acquirees have negotiating leverage. (Or maybe the acquirors are hallucinating that their stocks are undervalued).

A list of recent M&A in the sector is below. But first, here are the single folks still waiting to be scooped up:

Acquantive, Valueclick, Burst Media, and AdPepper, the latter two of which trade on London's AIM. How much might the U.S. ones go for? AQNT is worth $44 if you use the TFSM take-out multiple (23x), $60 if you use the DCLK multiple (33x), and $75 if you use the Right Media multiple (10x EV/Revs). VCLK is worth $44 if you use the TFSM multiple, $66 if you use DCLK, $70 if you use Right Media. And then of course there are all the private beauties: Blue Lithium, Tacoda, Efficient Frontier, Did-It, etc. Go to it, bankers!

Recent Digital Advertising M&A

Google for Doubleclick: $3.1b cash (32x '07 EBITDA - my estimate) - ad serving, SEM, affiliate network

Publicis for Digitas (DTAS): $1.3b cash (16x '07 EBITDA) - digital ad agency

Yahoo for 80% Right Media: $680m cash & stock - implied value = $850m (10x revs - rumored value) - ad media exchange

WPP for 24/7 Real Media (TFSM): $649m cash (23x '07 EBITDA) - media network, ad serving, SEM

Aquantive for Accipiter: $30m - publisher side ad server

Aquantive for Duke Digital Marketing: $8m + earnout - European digital ad agency

AOL for AdTech: terms undisclosed - European ad server

Aegis for Trigger Communications: terms undisclosed - digital ad agency

Fox Interactive Media for Strategic Data Corp: terms undisclosed - publisher side ad server and site optimization

Doubleclick for Falk eSolutions: terms undisclosed - European ad server

Aquantive for DNA (UK), e-Crusade (Hong Kong/Shanghai), Amnesia (Australia), Neue Digitale (Germany)

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