#youtube-advertising

#youtube-advertising

Google has been coveting lucrative TV ad budgets for more than a decade. But despite stats showing that an increasing amount of YouTube viewing takes place on TV sets in the living room, its ad sellers faced a hurdle. Many advertisers and agencies classified YouTube as "online video" or "social media," treating it as a separate part of the media plan from TV.

From an ad tech perspective, 2025 will be remembered as the year Google quietly recalibrated - retreating from some of its longest-running bets while accelerating decisively in others. The most visible reversal came with the effective end of the Privacy Sandbox experiment and Google's decision to walk back plans to fully deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome. After years of insisting that Privacy Sandbox represented the future of web advertising, Google instead opted for optionality,

Let's make a deal The news marks Cadent's third acquisition and fourth M&A deal in as many as three years. In 2023, the company bought EMX's SSP technology in a bankruptcy auction, just a few months before getting itself acquired by private equity firm Novacap for $600 million. Last year, Cadent also spent $324 million acquiring AdTheorent, a performance-based DSP that represented a further push on Cadent's part to become a more omnichannel marketing company.