Seth Goldstein points out the real significance behind the recent storm of mergers and acquisitions in the digital advertising space:
I am surprised at the lack of critical perspective about the consolidation of cookies being placed and managed on users’ computers without their knowledge…The recent spamacornucopia means more than $10 BILLION DOLLARS OF YOUR DATA IS BEING EXCHANGED AMONG BUYERS AND SELLERS THAT YOU DON’T CONTROL, starting with DoubleClick (and H&F their private equity owner) and Google, and then Right Media (Redpoint) and Yahoo!, and then 24/7 and WPP, and now aQuantive and Microsoft.
Seth raises a good question. And along those lines, how did the private-equity deals for information companies Acxiom and Alliance Data fly so far under the radar, relative to, say, Doubleclick? Collectively, those two deals were perhaps even more significant than the ones Seth noted. What does all this mean for us?