FPC hopes you are surviving the usual Q4 chaos - and that you are smashing your golden quarter targets. No Pogues or Mariah Carey yet (too early?). But you know that big-voiced diva and raspy trad punk poet will own the airwaves in a matter of weeks. Like Santa and media rebates, it’s all so inevitable.

We have had a flurry of product launches and M&A news over the past few weeks - including our own DA sale to Zeta. Congratulations again to Ruben and the team.

We touched on it in the last update: this deal didn’t just prove out our thesis; it also set us on a different path in how we operate as an operator-led capital allocator (predominantly European).

We called it Full-Stack Venture (FSV). And we want to elaborate a little more on that in this edition. Here, we set out what FSV actually means for our LPs and corporate investors.

Vanilla Flavoured VCs Will Struggle

In an age when a handful of scaled (mostly Silicon Valley-based) funds are scooping up the lion’s share of LP investment, and mid-sized “vanilla” VC firms are being starved of capital, a new type of fund is flourishing.

Call them hands-on vertical specialists. Call them ecosystem funds. They do much more than allocate money in the vain hope of an exit. But we actually think you need to do more to survive in this new category. To make the grade, you need to go full-stack.

We believe FSV is the only logical route for our fund profile. We are very much an ecosystem fund with outsized influence in the non-US market. As noted in the last post, FSV has three core components: build, scale, and sell. The graphic below outlines this in more visual detail with a nice workflow:

Incubations (FPC & Corporate)

The key part of FSV is the build - specifically incubations. This is where FirstPartyCapital Fund 2 will get interesting for our LPs and the industry at large. Corporate investors de-risk international innovation projects by building incubations directly with FirstPartyCapital. We have the development team and internal resources to launch new ad tech startups successfully. We intend to make ad tech R&D more accessible for strategic partners.

We will also be building our own incubations. Our operator-led team has decades of experience working in non-US ad tech. We see the world through a different lens and have identified six or seven new opportunities around signal, infrastructure, and AAT (Adjacent Ad Tech).

We'll roll these new startups out over the coming months. We have a simple strategy: incubate and fund the development of new solutions, reach revenue fast, bring in a talented team, scale, and then sell.

Leadership Team Necessary To Scale

Very rarely does top-tier European talent have the opportunity to get real upside in high-potential ad tech startup businesses. Few can sacrifice salary to take a punt on an early-stage startup. We think we have found a happy medium: relatively stable, high-growth businesses with a salary and meaningful equity.

FPC’s incubation strategy is designed to take startups from MVP to revenue, fast. The next step is bringing in talent to scale and drive an exit. We intend to keep these companies very lean, but sales, product, and tech talent is requisite to move incubations from promising ideas to must-have acquisitions. We have already done this with Bedrock, so FPC has an existing blueprint that does work.

Understanding The “Goldilocks” M&A Market

FPC has acted, and continues to act, as an M&A advisor to European ad tech. You need to have a deep understanding of the ecosystem, market valuations, and what strategics want to buy.

We know there is a range in which non-US ad tech deals can thrive - like the ad tech equivalent of the Goldilocks zone, where, for life to survive, you need the right planetary conditions and a no-margin-for-error proximity to a star.

Generally, it’s a lower-to-upper-middle number: big enough to matter to a strategic buyer, small enough to get done (a quasi-tuck-in acquisition, if you will), but below the number typical bankers are prepared to get out of bed for. In that ad tech Goldilocks scenario, everyone wins: LPs, the senior team, and, of course, FPC.

Worth noting again: FPC has done this twice now (Nexta-to-Kevel and DA-to-Zeta), using our position in the ecosystem to fund and sell great European companies to bigger (US) buyers, achieving great outcomes for LPs, founders and the buyers.

All In On The FSV Model

This is not an identity crisis; it’s an evolution over six years. We’ve recognised that we know our market better than most. We have the tools at our disposal to build, scale and sell great ad tech companies at a range that is digestible for strategic buyers. Rinse and repeat.

Suddenly, the swinging-for-the-fences ad tech plays seem a lot riskier than a bunch of well-priced, well-executed exits. It’s always been a process for FPC. And what we now understand is that we will win in the aggregate by being the ultimate ecosystem play. FSV is the only game in town now. We are all in. Until the next edition, ad tech nation, keep smashing in those IOs.

Hello readers. Many of you have probably been in New York this week for Advertising Week, beating the Manhattan pavements and travelling between meetings and sponsored events. It’s always a long and arduous one - but always hugely fun and productive. Kevin Flood, our venerable fund GP, was there this year representing FPC. We will all be back next year. No doubt.

The Exit That Happened This Week

So, you might have read the news on the wires and seen the LinkedIn updates: FPC has had an exit. It’s our first. Zeta Global announced this week that it was acquiring our portfolio company, digitalAudience.

Why was DA (digitalAudience) acquired? As we have written extensively over the past few months, data infrastructure is the hottest category in ad tech. And Zeta saw an opportunity to add a strong data tech offering to its AI marketing stack.

We invested in DA four years ago and have worked closely with the company since. We have got to know Ruben, Wouter, Bastiaan and the wider team very well. They are top-class ad tech people - and FPC is delighted for their richly deserved success.

DA has thrived in the most unforgiving ad tech market in the world (namely Europe), building a world-class scaled data infrastructure platform and a strong business. It’s a credit to the DA team.

Positioning A Strategic Asset

FPC worked closely with the DA team on the sale. We helped shape the strategy and positioning. When DA was getting early inbound, we sat down with the management team to map out a plan.

FPC and the DA team refined and elevated a clear position around the data infrastructure category, highlighting DA’s leadership as one of the most critical players outside the US.

And it wasn’t marketing BS either: the company was already working with huge clients and had built the onboarding rails into all the major buying platforms and walled gardens. It was also developing the framework around agentic media buying and AI-powered marketing. In short: DA was a must-have asset.

We followed a playbook we’d developed on a previous European ad tech deal: the Nexta sale to Kevel, where we acted as the sole advisor. It was clear to us that DA and the category it operates in mattered hugely to strategics. Connecting data signals to custom algos and agentic solutions is becoming table stakes for the industry, and the infrastructure underneath it is essential. DA was sitting right in the middle of an ad tech M&A zeitgeist. We just helped execute. That’s easy when you have a great company and a great team.

Farm-To-Table Thesis

So what is FPC now? We build. We invest. We sell companies. We’re certainly not a traditional VC. If we just invested, we’d fail miserably. We always needed to be embedded in the ecosystem. Rich Ashton, our Managing Partner, put it best when he called FirstPartyCapital a Full-Stack Venture firm. FSV, if you will. Yes, another bloody TLA.

There are three key parts to our FSV:

One: we incubate and invest early. One of the standout prospects from Fund 1 is Bedrock Platform, an incubation. It now has a stellar team running the business and is building the next big ad tech category: the Composable Buying Platform. Not hyperbole, just reality. Just as Invite Media established the DSP all those years ago, Bedrock is blazing its own trail. We’ve followed Bedrock Platform up with six new incubations, each breaking new ground in ad tech and establishing a monopoly of one in AAT (Adjacent Ad Tech) categories.

Two: we scale incubations (continuing to invest and bring in new investors). Getting an incubation beyond the concept stage is always a tough task. You want a working product with a path to revenue and profitability. You want to invest enough to give it room to build and grow, but not overinvest. An excessively inflated valuation is a death sentence in this market. We bring in a top-tier team to run our investments and incubations, with meaningful equity and salary funding. We de-risk founding teams and incentivise the path to scale and exit.

There’s so much talent in this market, and we keep working with the best and brightest to build businesses customers want to pay for, and strategics want to buy. That’s also appealing to co-investors looking for relatively de-risked opportunities. Remember, we’re in ad tech: the business of building better mousetraps. We are not building data centres in space.

Three: We sell ad tech. The board always decides who to appoint as an advisor. But FPC now has the track record of making deals happen, especially in the mid-to-lower level valuation range where most bankers/advisors aren’t going to engage.

We know how to position our companies. We know the strategic buyers and what they want to buy. DA and Nexta prove it.

We are focused on getting liquidity for our LPs from Fund 1. And FPC continues to evolve its proposition, optimising for the huge opportunities in this market. It’s been a big (tiring) week, from M&A to tentpole events. Time for some downtime. Thanks for reading, and have a great ad tech day.

Over the last couple of weeks, FPC spoke with a recently exited European ad tech founder and a soon-to-leave-company big ad tech hitter about new startup endeavours. Both told FPC they are working on new startups in “adjacent ad tech” categories.

Adjacent ad tech (AAT) is a trend we are seeing more of, as new startups look to build their own categories and become the monopoly of one - breaking new ground in an industry over-optimised for one giant media market. What is adjacent ad tech, and what is the rationale for building an AAT solution?

America Is Still “Home Of Scale”

It would be stupid and feckless to write off a go-big-or-go-home US play. The numbers don’t lie. The exits don’t lie. It’s the world’s biggest homogenised ad market. Even with extreme walled garden penetration, the open internet is still massive in the US.

You can eke out a great living and more easily reach £100 million in revenue, even with an under-the-radar, me-too, somewhat undifferentiated product.

The buy-side economics are hard to ignore. There are over 4000 indie agencies in the US - many of which easily outspend regional holdco agencies in Europe. You can follow the well-trodden route of greats like MIQ and go regional first, avoiding painfully expensive New York and LA hires. Indies in the US are open to testing - so opportunities abound for good ad tech.

If you intend to go to the US, get raising (big cheques are required). Scale is possible. Look at the enormous Vibe exit recently. Ultimately, the probability of success is much lower than your US peers. Along the way, it really is a game of luck. For every stellar Vibe success, there are 100 failures. It’s not down to a shit product, but to inherent barriers in competing in the US.

Optimising To The US: The Inherent Structural Disadvantages

When deciding to optimise your solution for the US, keep a few things in mind. First, consider money. US ad tech can raise more money than you. In some cases, that might not always be true. French VCs always seem to have money for French ad tech looking to have a go. But for the rest of European and ROW ad tech, it’s not so simple.

FPC has seen it first-hand: US startups have access to an infinitely larger pool of capital. It gives them an inherent advantage. This is not a gripe - just a reality.

Structural issue number two: your US peers are based in the US. They don’t have to worry about the bureaucracy of obtaining a visa or the mental torture of moving family to the US. That’s a lot to deal with when you are going to the mat every day to win market share.

The third structural issue is: network. Every great ecosystem is shaped by its influencers and decision-makers. The US has key individuals you need onside. If you don’t win hearts and minds, you will be starved of the ad tech publicity oxygen you need to gain adoption. This is critical as you look to get visibility in competitive categories.

Arthur Querou absolutely nailed this, becoming a living ad tech folk hero with his antics. It helped the profile of the company - and definitely got him on the radar of every major corp dev team.

‘Tis But an Ad Tech Scratch

We have been observing this market reality for some time and have optimised how we invest accordingly. Continuing with the same US-at-any-cost strategy would be a definitive lose-lose for everyone. The structural issues above (funding, location and embedded network) limit exit opportunities.

It’s not that we wouldn’t have outcomes; it’s just that the US-or-bust gambit has a lower chance of financial success overall. And ultimately we want to make money for our LPs and ourselves.

Rare exceptions exist, of course. Bedrock Platform (an incubation from Fund 1), for instance, just invented its own ad tech category - Composable Buying Platform (CBP) - disrupting the current tech infrastructure supply chain. It is upending established industry norms and taking a chainsaw to eye-watering ad tech taxes. The company is on a serious trajectory. It’s having its “Invite Media” moment - and a seismic reordering event in the ad tech ecosystem is underway.

Bedrock aside, it is hard to justify a face-off with better-funded US companies in their own backyard. It’s akin to the Black Knight fighting King Arthur in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. The Black Knight loses a number of limbs in a one-sided broadsword fight with Arthur - but still believes he can win.

He shouts, “’Tis but a scratch”, as he aimlessly throws his armless torso around the place. In this instance, The Black Knight is very much non-US ad tech - outmanoeuvred and outmatched by a better-funded and more connected US peer. Maybe instead of Monty Python, we should be building strategy around ad tech Sun Tzu. Effectively, fight a competitive battle on your own terms. As we pointed out in a previous post, most ad tech is optimised for the US. Why does it have to be so?

Ad Tech Adjacency Is Just Innovation Writ Large

You are rightly asking now: what is ad tech adjacency? From an FPC perspective, it’s finding areas where a localised or verticalised competitive advantage is built in.

In this part of the world, areas like legal / data compliance, risk intelligence, data modelling, verticalised media, and sovereign infrastructure are obvious opportunities, with large, untouched commercial markets attached.

If you zoom out, you could conclude that all we’re really doing with AAT is innovating. America is just one giant pool of ad spend. It does what it does. And there is nothing wrong with that - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It’s just not a great use of effort, time or capital for a non-US fund that must think differently because of the aforementioned structural constraints. Who in their right mind would want to bring a rusty blunt butter knife to a tank fight? Certainly not FPC.

Ironically, US Ad Tech Buys AAT

If you have read up to this point, you’ve discerned a clear, emerging fund thesis: incubating new ideas around a localised and verticalised (but scalable) ecosystem. The buyer of the majority - if not all - will be large US ad tech firms and strategics.

Surprised? You really shouldn’t be. It’s logical for US companies to buy new revenue globally, outsourcing R&D to seasoned local operators who instinctively understand non-US geographies. As we pointed out earlier, why would US ad tech conceive of new categories outside the US that require nuanced development, risk-tolerant investment and specialised teams to build?

As part of Fund 2, corporates can co-incubate new ad tech ventures with FPC, shape them around their own strategic gaps, and then co-invest alongside Fund 2 to take equity, preferred access, and implicit first look at acquisition.

All that is couched around our ability to incubate and scale native ad tech businesses that can thrive and survive outside the US.

We build and scale them. US ad tech buys them. We are seeing that play out right now.

FPC currently has 6 incubations in production at various stages - from nascent risk intelligence and legal compliance platforms to revenue-generating AI infrastructure.

There has never been a better time to build new ad tech solutions. FPC is focusing hard on the AAT opportunity. We are looking for smart corporates and co-investors to help build and fund it. As ever, get in touch if you want to learn more about our incubations and where the hotspots are in the industry. And on that epic note, we will leave it there for the week.

As regular readers of The FPC Newsletter know, we are massive bulls on OOH ad tech. We have discussed the macro trends that are making the channel a huge opportunity for innovative ad tech startups.

We talked about its continued importance for brand building in an AI-first world that is quickly collapsing the traditional marketing funnel.

And we put the case forward for a $100 billion OOH market by the end of the decade.

In this edition of the newsletter, we’ll outline a clear thesis for why OOH is a key investment focus for our Fund 2. It’s an exciting space, and we are all in.

The Market Opportunity

Let’s start with the raw numbers and projected growth over the next decade. In 2025, the market grew 15% to $54 billion. WOO (World Out of Home Organisation) attributed this strong growth to the rise of programmatic and DOOH.

Even if growth compounded at the rate of 4% - roughly the rate implied by WOO’s own trajectory, and backed up by PwC’s 3.9% OOH forecast - the market will be in excess of $66 billion by 2030.

At the bullish end of the scale (because we love to over-index to the bull case), we could get into the 75-100 billion range. To get there, you’d need not only a strong macroeconomic tailwind but also a significant shift in how buyers perceive OOH.

OOH would need to steal market share from other channels, and overlap with hyper-growth retail media would need to accelerate aggressively.

Why are these headline numbers great for ad tech startups? A few underlying data points are worth outlining here: digital screens now account for nearly half of OOH inventory, overtaking static supply by the end of the year; pDOOH is still small but is expected to grow at 17% per year until the end of the decade.

These two pieces of information underline why it’s a great time to build activation and measurement solutions in the space - put simply, OOH needs more ad tech.

Why Industry Fragmentation Is Good For Business

OOH remains a highly fragmented space. Lots of independent players operate on the supply and demand side. It feels like pre-programmatic display advertising. On the media side, the big opportunity is at the aggregation layer, since screen/inventory owners are unlikely to consolidate. And right now, many opportunities remain to build either programmatic infrastructure or a classic ad net.

Just a note: vanilla aggregation is not the winner. Sales houses offer undifferentiated supply. Data-driven solutions with access to unique demand/supply will be requisite for any OOH growth story. Buyers want addressable scale. Sellers want new sources of demand.

No Google. No Meta. No Amazon. No Walled Gardens.

Google, Amazon and Meta run huge monopolies across the biggest media channels. But big tech cannot leverage its digital heft (data and assets) in OOH to dominate, making it very attractive to both builders and investors.

Sure, big tech integrates DSPs (DV360 and Amazon DSP) into some pDOOH supply - but extreme fragmentation and chronic complexity prevent another suffocating monopolist play.

You can build ad tech for OOH without worrying about aggressive price gouging or competition-crushing auction manipulation - which big tech has been either accused (Amazon) or found liable for (Google).

Big tech is part of the ecosystem; it’s not the ecosystem itself. Another reason to be all over this vertical.

The M&A Proves Why OOH Is A Strong Area To Invest

The OOH M&A market is very robust. Over the last few years, outcomes have totalled billions. Between 2023 and 2026, notable OOH ad tech deals include Perion-to-Hivestack ($100M+), T-Mobile-to-Vistar Media ($621M) and MidOcean Partners-to-GSTV ($500-600M).

Europe has seen several big exits. Blis, ClearChannel (Northern European assets sold to Bauer for $625 million), Skyrise and Splicky all point to a healthy M&A market in Europe.

We believe there is a lot of juice left in OOH European lemon - especially if you invest in the right solution and create the right conditions.

What We Are Looking For - In OOH Ad Tech

It’s important to outline what we are looking to invest in. Are we looking for another DSP or SSP? No. On the media side, we like ad nets. Ad nets with a data/tech asset, unique supply and unique demand. We like a good monopoly - a category with one dominant player.

There is a bunch of whitespace in OOH, and we are excited about what could be built. There is a commercial blueprint to get these companies to revenue and profitability. FPC has the resources and network to invest, scale and exit (at very strong multiples). We are lining up at least two investments that fit our internal thesis.

We also like measurement and attribution. Measurement is messy in OOH; fragmentation makes it very difficult to measure ad efficacy. It is changing, no doubt - but it still has a way to go. That is presenting an opening for new companies to think smarter and bigger. OOH is evolving to become an essential outcomes-focused channel for big brands - not just an add-on mid-to-upper funnel activation.

How Do We Go From Standing Start To A £100 Million+ Exit?

FPC has access to 250+ LPs in senior roles across the global industry. Some of whom have deep experience scaling big OOH plays.

As an in-the-weeds ad tech specialist fund, we have a plan to make this work (TLDR outlined below).

• Identify the defensible area

• Combine commercial framework with proprietary data/tech

• Build the category

• Hype the category

• Establish category leadership

• Know the buying cohort from day one

• Sell the business to one of the identified cohorts (through a tried-and-tested FPC methodology)

And that ends our in-depth OOH thesis. Happy to expand on the above and give our LPs the insider view. Until next time, readers.

It’s only a handful of days away from the Glastonbury of ad tech, namely ATS London. Our own event, MadTechMoney, is running on the same day. We have a jam-packed agenda. Be sure to get your ticket, as everyone of note will be there. We’ll talk about the industry’s future from a practitioner’s point of view and a money perspective. The excitement is palpable.

One panel FPC is looking forward to is: Tokenomics - The Future of AI Infrastructure. The discussion will focus on how AI is upending the infrastructure and work processes that underpin the industry overall. Specifically, it will cover why orgs must quickly address cost, sovereignty, and utility.

Our own Steve McCartney, CEO of portco Carpio, will be on that panel, discussing the intricacies of open-weight models versus frontier LLMs. An opportune time, then, to speak about our latest incubation (the sixth we are working on internally).

Steve and the Carpio team have been building out a new AI infrastructure company (currently in beta) over the past 12 months to address major infrastructure issues around enterprise AI use in the digital marketing space. This is a verticalised solution aimed at brands, agencies, publishers, ad tech, and martech - specifically those with a non-US focus. We already have 4 incubations building on top of the new solution. We are definitely eating our own dog food at FPC.

The use case is built around three key pillars:

1. Cost: The cost of using frontier LLMs is spiralling. And with a duopoly looking to dominate that market, price rises are inevitable. Many organisations are using the largest models from OpenAI and Claude to do menial, low-level tasks - when there is absolutely no need. This is now a huge cost issue for companies relying on AI for back-office functions. For agencies and brands already operating on thin margins, that’s not a simple ”tokenomics” problem; it’s real money coming straight off the bottom line.

2. Sovereignty: This is a huge issue for companies in our space. Many brands have baked AI use into agency contracts. Many are rightfully fearful about IP and client data sovereignty. Even with the best contractual guarantees, jurisdiction creates exposure you can’t fully address. This is a big issue for European-based entities, and data sovereignty is top of mind for everyone. You need to be comfortable with exactly where the infrastructure and your sensitive data sit.

3. Utility: This seems obvious now. But why waste so much money doing utility stuff on expensive frontier models? But what open-weight models do you use? You need to test, score and outline their specific function. Our new solution does all of that and keeps information on all models up to date. That’s why we are verticalised; we focus on use cases within digital marketing. Our objective is to give our customers technical autonomy. We don’t want to compete with your model-building strategy. You should own and run that in an environment where your proprietary or client data doesn’t train a frontier model - or where your IP is used to build a competing product (cc Figma).

The service has 5 core (modular) parts (see below). Simply, pick and choose the parts you need.

1. Hardware: Owned GPU/CPU capacity in the UK & EU - not to out-build hyperscalers on raw compute, but to guarantee exactly where your data sits and who can access it.

2. Model serving: Turns GPU hours into tokens and outputs.

3. Gateway: Routes, bills, controls, and secures requests

4. Individual services: One job per API tuned for vertical-specific use cases.

5. Full applications: Memory, content studio, compliance, and more built by you, us, or 3^rd-parties on top of this stack.

This is the uber-geeky heart of AI in digital marketing. We are now looking for beta partners to work with us: those who want to cut costs, secure data sovereignty, and access tried-and-tested, cutting-edge models. We’re particularly keen to talk to mid-sized agencies and ad tech companies looking to offer this - for internal use or white-labelled to their own clients.

We have put together a visual overview of the solution:

If that is your organisation, email contact@firstpartycapital.com for more information. Steve and the team will be at ATS London on September 15 and will be happy to field questions directly about our new incubation. See you there.

Hello readers. Our MadTechMoney event is a week and a bit away, and we're hosting it alongside the mega ad tech conference, ATS London, on September 15 (get your ticket). It’s an action-packed MTM agenda - from fundraising to scaling to exiting.

One panel to watch out for is our M&A deep dive. We will no doubt be discussing the hottest areas of ad tech and how best to sell into this market momentum.

Ad tech M&A in Europe remains a very nuanced process. But ultimately you can never discount visceral animal spirits and the absolute FOMO that motivate buyers.

In this edition, we will discuss how to catch the ad tech M&A zeitgeist: specifically, how propaganda and clever positioning can play a pivotal role in the sales process.

Establishing The Important Categories

Without giving away the MTM panel discussion points, here are a few established and emerging categories that are capturing the buyers’ attention:

• Performance CTV (very much a US-centric category): This particular zeitgeist has come and gone. But it is the most recent example of a category that generated huge hype and sizable transactions: TVScientific went for $400 million to Pinterest, and Vibe sold for over $1 billion to Walmart. More on how orchestrated collective action drove successful outcomes and what we can glean from it below.

• Containerisation: This one is a nascent ad tech category. But we expect this to blow up over the next 12 months. What is containerisation? Put simply: it is the process of hosting ad tech - bidding logic, targeting, measurement, creative delivery - inside a platform’s own infrastructure, rather than as an external, stand-alone third-party solution. Index Exchange (an investor in FPC) has been pushing this aggressively over the past year. Our Bedrock Platform remains the world's first and only containerised DSP. Containerisation is a big deal for the following reasons: 1) it takes a chainsaw to out-of-control levels of ad tech taxation; 2) it enables the use of more proprietary data, as it keeps data in place instead of exporting to 3rd party platforms; and 3) it creates room for real-time innovation inside the bid window (no round-trip means more time to do things like data modelling and other mind-bending millisecond related tasks). Now every good ad tech category deserves a solid TLA. How about CAT: Containerised Ad Tech? Containerisation will gather momentum to become the breakout category in 2027.

• Identity & Onboarding (post-LiveRamp): FPC got accosted on LI a few months back for suggesting that vendors, agencies and brands will be scrambling to get off LiveRamp now that it’s part of Publicis. Those naysayers are obviously wrong. Most LiveRamp customers that compete directly with Publicis are looking hard for replacements. Acquisitions will happen as vendors and agencies build new solutions in the post-LiveRamp era. FPC has multiple bets in this burgeoning category, and all will doubtless be targets for acquisitive agencies and ad tech. This is the M&A zeitgeist of the moment.

• Proprietary Signal Vendors (PSV): The PSV will have its own panel at ATS London on September 15. Regular readers will know that FPC coined the term SSA (Super Signal Aggregator), the TLA that launched 1,000 startup decks and PE pitches. Keep an eye on the PSV as SSAs like Nielsen/DV and Experian add even more signal to power their data stack. Agencies, too, are looking for PSVs to help train custom algos. Expect to see more purchases around attention, quality, and sustainability. Sustainability is the signal that is returning with a vengeance, moving from vanity to performance.

• We're incubating other new categories, but more on that later.

Why Well-Timed Propaganda Ferments Demand

The reason why both TVScientific & Vibe sold for so much was the heat generated by the founders and associated investors. Through various influencer vehicles and media outlets, both companies were hyped to the hilt. Performance CTV was talked about ad nauseam.

Both were effectively tidy UIs built on top of Beeswax (Vibe eventually built their own DSP). Both spent large amounts on customer acquisition. Both churned through many customers. But this mattered little as the narrative was so sharp and so clear - and was parroted by enough ad tech tastemakers to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This resulted in a minor bidding war for Vibe. FOMO was maximised throughout the process. Walmart ended up forking out a billion-plus for the company.

Propaganda matters. It stokes the emotions of buyers. And the yanks are world-class at it. When executed well, a strong category narrative can get you very far. It gives you the big mo, as they say.

A Structured Process

FPC is developing its own secret sauce of propaganda. We want to perfect a tried-and-trusted methodology, but in a subtler and region-specific way. The Americans have zero filter when pushing their own book - an admirable shamelessness that just won’t work in this part of the world.

European M&A requires a little more intellectual dexterity. First, when establishing the category, and then when putting the detailed case forward for the company itself. It takes a little more time and focus. Shouting about it on a weekly podcast only gets you so much mileage.

Putting together a sustained narrative around the company’s tech capabilities and category importance while running an M&A sales process is critical to success. Buyers need to understand the asset’s intrinsic value. A data room with financial details doesn’t sell a company on its own; it’s part of a bigger process.

You need to get into a buyer’s head. What is the potential of the company you are selling? How can you own the category? How could it change your own story overall? As FPC keeps saying, this is a 60/40 business: 60% bullshit, 40% tech. And your bullshit needs to be marketable and achievable.

We have the weaponry to do the full life cycle of an ad tech company - from incubation right through to a sale. It’s only taken 6 years to get the model up and running. The model is still evolving, but we’ve now got the necessary ad tech muscle memory to scale it and sell it.

MadTechMoney is going to be a lot of fun this year. We look forward to seeing you all there - and telling you how we are going to execute on our grand plans. See you at ATS London on September 15.

Come to Our Pre-Event ATS London Drinks (Monday, Sept 14)

We are hosting a drinks reception with our fund partner, Index Exchange, the evening before ATS London on Sept 14. Expect cutting-edge chat about CATs and other in-the-weeds ad tech topics. This will be a fun intellectual preamble to the epic ad tech bonanza the following day on Sept 15.

You can register here to attend the drinks event: https://events.indexexchange.com/happyhourwithfirstpartycapital.

And on that public service announcement, we will sign off for this edition.

Good day to you, reader. FPC hopes this edition of the FPC newsletter finds you well. If not, then we can understand why. Over the past twelve months, a deluge of negativity from all directions has focused on ad tech’s long-term viability. Most of it has been confused, reductive analysis, an unfortunate conflation of confirmation bias and outright ignorance - first from the public markets and then from industry insiders.

Of course, all this matters very little to the industry’s broader growth outside declining areas like browser-based advertising. But FPC feels it needs to put the bull case forward anyway. We think the upside is significant. In this edition, we will outline 6 reasons - in no particular order - why (to steal from the Dandy Warhols) ad tech chat is so passé.

1. Elasticity Versus Consolidation: Ad tech is the central nervous system of activation and measurement of media and marketing. It evolves with every new piece of consumer innovation. The rise of answer-based search is surfacing a new category for monetisation - and ad tech is already building for it. And yes, browser-based ad tech will consolidate. That’s an inevitability as the “open web” experiences its print moment. But the industry “landscape” always keeps evolving and adding new logos because the game never stops.

2. European M&A Tech Is Buoyant: There is buoyant M&A in European ad tech. Sub-£50 million-priced companies are fetching strong multiples (well above the industry average). FPC is working on a few deals right now. Strategics are looking to buy good companies - and Europe has them in spades at affordable prices. Skyrise’s exit to TapTap this week was another example of that. Skyrise built a strong OOH activation and measurement platform. Its proprietary data product gives TapTap a solution that can now scale to the US and other European markets. Smart strategics are buying Europe.

3. Ad Tech’s Undiscovered Country: In a recent post, we discussed our Fund 2 focus on incubation strategy. The hot take: why are we building for the US when huge, scalable opportunities exist elsewhere? The point is that ad tech, broadly, operates with blinkers on. The agentic hype train is the current quasi-zeitgeist, sucking time and resources. Maybe (or maybe not) buying agents will replace The Trade Desk, and its chunky media budget will be distributed. Maybe agencies will embrace agentic trading/measurement agents/verification agents, and brands will shift budgets. But it’s all highly speculative and highly competitive, where name recognition matters more than core tech. We prefer the road less travelled around compliance, data modelling, verticalised AI infrastructure, media risk intelligence, and verticalised media plays, where our incubations focus on winnable and scalable sectors in our own backyard. We prefer pushing the envelope to just reinventing another ad tech margin layer.

4. The Open Internet Is Growing: The open web (browser-based advertising) is definitely on the wane. Hard to ignore the evidence. But even that will plateau at some stage - as publishers find new ways to reach users. The open internet (CTV, app, OOH, audio) is growing. If you talk to any of the SSPs on the quiet, they will tell you that they are growing. Having focused on app and CTV, they are less dependent on open web display. Money will flow to where users are. And the fact is, all the channels named above are growing. So don’t conflate open web decline with the rest of the media and marketing ecosystem. Honestly, readers, things are pretty good.

5. Platform-Based Tech, Very Investable: Walled gardens are growing their market share of advertising. It’s a stat we cannot ignore. Many of the walled gardens are still very messy around brand safety, compliance, targeting, and measurement. You need third parties to plug that gap. And you can grow decent-sized businesses on the platforms. Of course, there is always the risk that the platform could disintermediate you, building your functionality into the platform. Possibly. But there are things they cannot do. PBTs have a place in the ad tech ecosystem - and will be in demand as walled gardens become even more entrenched.

6. Shifting Holdco Model, A Good Thing: The holdco model is changing radically. Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP have all bought ad tech assets, mostly to build out data IP. Publicis has been the most aggressive. They recently bought LiveRamp, which has given them a scaled global spine when merged with Lotame. All of them are looking to control execution (whether it’s overall media buying execution or a carved-out principal media operation). What do they want from ad tech? Signal: they want proprietary signal to train their buying algos. FPC continues to invest in this side of the business. Supply-chain control: agencies want to improve performance, cut costs around media execution and innovate at the edge. Containerised DSPs offer a new level of efficiency and capability for outcomes-focused agencies. We see this holdco shift as fertile ground for cos like Bedrock to build market share.

And we will end it there on that dose of positivity. The space is as exciting as it ever was - except if you have managed to paint yourself into a one-dimensional ad tech corner. Look forward to seeing you all at MadTechMoney and ATS London in a few weeks, where we can discuss all of this.

Good day to you, FPC Newsletter reader. In this edition, we’ll discuss scaling ad tech in EMEA. Nigel Gilbert, former frontman for AppNexus Europe, wrote a LinkedIn post this week about a common mistake US companies make: treating EMEA as one homogeneous market. Nigel, who disappeared into the Accenture vortex for a number of years (but has re-emerged refreshed and energised), put together a thoughtful, nuanced thesis that “one size does not fit all” for a scaled European business.

It is difficult for US companies to conceive of this ridiculous fragmentation. It’s really hard. Much harder than setting up a sales operation in Alabama and accessing big localised media budgets. But there is a path to scale in Europe - albeit tricky, not impossible. Below is the FPC (rough) guide to scaling in Europe, ME and Africa.

• Local Is The Go-To Strategy

London is not the gateway to EMEA. Every market acts autonomously in Europe and beyond. Global trading deals are only as good as the paper they are printed on. So you need to invest in local talent with the right connections - Germans buy from Germans, French from French, etc. Holdcos act as fiefdoms within a larger collective organisation. We see it all the time with our portfolio companies. It might start as a global MSA, but activation across individual markets requires more persuading and selling. It’s back-breaking work. Individual markets are dwarfed by the sheer size of the US hegemon. The aggregate EMEA market is worth it in the end.

• Lead With An Omnichannel Product

You can build a business purely on the open internet. But it is difficult (nay, foolish) to ignore the walled gardens. They are even more entrenched in EMEA than in the US. YouTube is CTV in Europe, especially at scale. Agencies keep chucking huge sums of money into it. Likewise, Meta, TikTok and Amazon. YouTube alone is enough, but having all four will open up a lot more opportunities. FPC isn’t saying the open internet isn't worth the effort in Europe; it just takes longer to make it work (integrations, people, fragmented measurement, etc.). The omnichannel strategy is definitely a good fit for new entrants.

• ID Graph/Onboarding

Building an ID graph for EMEA isn’t easy - but if you can, it can be hugely beneficial to the company’s commercial success. LiveRamp (acquired by Publicis) succeeded in the US, but failed in Europe. Few have managed it. Only two companies have had a proper go at it: Lotame (acquired by Publicis) and Eyeota (acquired by Dun & Bradstreet Company). We also need to add a third to that list: digitalAudience. The FPC portfolio company has been quietly building a scaled European ID graph and onboarding business for years. This becomes even more important as you push the omnichannel narrative to prospective and disparate EMEA agencies and brands.

• Buy FPC portfolio companies

We might be talking up our own book here, but this is so obvious and logical: why plough money into an unknown fragmented market when you can strategically buy your way in? Here is the FPC shopping list of great companies that will undoubtedly help you scale:

• Lumen: The leading attention signal in the market - offering a potential acquirer a way to build first-party attention into their non-US offering. It has omnichannel applications and is used by the biggest brands, measurement companies and walled gardens.

• digitalAudience (DA): We have already mentioned digitalAudience above, which, in the PLA (Post-LiveRamp Age), makes DA a must-have.

• Evorra: The other heavyweight onboarding and ID graph company. It is powering scaled SSPs, media platforms, agencies and media companies globally - another in the crosshairs of the PLA.

• Audiences: The third company in this FPC data tech cohort (along with DA & Evorra) is Audiences. It specialises in scaled first-party onboarding. After recently signing Experian as a customer, it now offers something LiveRamp does not: autonomy over first-party ownership and activation.

• Picnic: It offers scaled omnichannel (open web and CTV) quality scoring - arguably a better version of Sincera.

FPC could list more portfolio companies to help that EMEA business development. The point is: M&A can be the smartest strategy for growth outside the US, shortcutting a long and arduous organic growth strategy.

• Patience With A Defined Objective

This might seem obvious, but there is no US-speed scale here. These are calculated moves you need to make. EMEA is a complex, highly relationship-driven, multi-market region. It takes time to navigate. Executing without a defined objective often wastes resources. Are you here because it will look good for an acquirer (an unnecessary tick box in some cases)? Or are you committed to building a serious business, as Nigel noted in his post, in a hugely complex multi-market? This is why ad tech strategics are investing in FPC. How do I get into this market or that market? Sometimes, it pays to have people who have spent decades working the ROW beat. Local knowledge is key to scaling in non-US markets.

On that note, we will sign off there for this edition. If you have any questions or queries about the above, reach out to us at contact@firstpartycapital.com.

This newsletter is being penned during a partial solar eclipse. Lots of people are running around with makeshift eclipse-friendly goggles made out of empty Rice Krispies boxes, jostling to see one of nature’s most wondrous (anti-climactic) events on a parched hill somewhere in London.

This useless piece of information is being communicated to you, dear reader, via email - the last piece of media real estate untouched by scaled ad tech. The reasons for this are myriad: no RTB infrastructure, no third-party cookies, and blocked identifiers. The list goes on. It just doesn’t fit the typical buyer’s checklist. And yet it is a hugely trusted medium - even more so in the age of AI slop.

Re-Inventing The Value Of Email Ads (The Sales Pitch)

Email ads have been a tough sell to both brands and agencies. But you feel now that email advertising is about to have a moment. Liveintent did a great job trying to scale it. But ultimately, it pivoted more into an ID play than a monetisation layer.

What email is missing is a re-invigorated sales narrative. It’s been typecast as either lower-funnel performance, attracting bottom-feeding demand from the chum box merchants, or an insanely expensive direct-sold brand sponsorship play.

Where it really needs to sit is in the mid-to-upper-funnel branding layer. Of course, this will need to be sold into agencies and brands as programmatic curation. In this edition, we sketch out this email curation offering using the Passendo tech framework - with a few additions.

How Email Curation Works

Now imagine you are an entity (publisher, ad net, ad tech) with a large sales organisation with a track record of selling curated deals. Things start to get a little hairy on the open web. If you believe the trade press and influencers, we are all doomed (the open web particularly). CTV is overcrowded. Retail media is a busted flush. Where to look for your next monetisation opportunity?

Agencies are crying out for more trusted, non-walled-garden channels to push client marketing messages, to avoid concentration of spend and reliance on a gamed (rigged) walled garden ecosystem. Why not email? But how do you sell it, activate it, and measure the efficacy of the email ad?

Below is a visual outline of how it might work - powered by the email ad specialists at Passendo, activated by world-class DSP, Bedrock Platform, and measured by peerless brand uplift studies provider, Brandmetrics.

If you have any questions about this latest piece of out-of-the-box ad tech thinking, get in touch. Passendo is happy to field any questions about email curation - and why it will be the next big programmatic frontier.

Update On That Video Player Asset Sale

As you know, we are selling a publisher/app video player. Details were outlined in the most recent edition of the FPC newsletter. You can read about it here: https://newsletter.firstpartycapital.com/p/for-sale-ai-video-platform-with-content.

If you are short on time, these are some basic details about the video player asset for sale:

• Adds video to any page, matching relevant clips via a relevance score, with an engagement dashboard (plays, completions)

• Includes licensed sports content (football, tennis, motorsport, boxing).

• Generates a text article from video content.

• One-off purchase, no ongoing licence fee.

We are now at the due diligence stage with a number of interested parties and are looking to close this off very soon. If you are interested in finding out more, then get in touch: contact@firstpartycapital.com.

FPC hopes you might think more about the value of email (from an ad tech perspective) after reading this email. Email curation FTW. Until next time.

Hello readers. It continues to be a ridiculously hot summer. Rain dancing shamans have been sent out across Europe in the vain hope that this incessant heat might break. You start to wonder why the industry has gone cold (excuse the pun) on sustainability.

We think sustainability will come back to ad tech with a vengeance in the coming months as the industry realises its performant value. Other signals (quality, attention) too will come to the fore again - the SSA (Super Signal Aggregator) reborn. Keep an eye out for all that in late Q3 and Q4.

Scaled Contextual Video Player For Sale

This newsletter edition isn’t about signal, though; instead, we are focused on an asset sale - an opportunity to buy a piece of scaled technology built by one of our portfolio companies.

The technology in question is a contextual video player that is no longer core to the company’s focus, as it is doubling down on its demand-side product.

The video player has been used by some of the biggest publishers in Europe and has access to a vast content library (via exclusive content syndication contracts). We think this will land well at a sell-side business that wants to own a proprietary player - and doesn’t want to pay huge rents to JWPlayer, Brightcove et al.

Here are a few top-line features for the video player:

• The video player plays video content on publisher web pages and can be added to pages that don’t currently have video.

• It selects which video to show based on the content of the page it’s being placed on, using a relevance score to match video to article.

• It includes a dashboard that shows engagement data, such as number of plays, completion rates, and how quickly videos are matched to pages.

• It includes licences to use sports video content (football, tennis, motorsport, boxing) from a number of different content providers, which can be shown through the player.

• It includes a separate tool that can generate a short written article based on a video, which a user can then review before publishing.

• Other video players such as JW Player typically charge an ongoing monthly or annual licence fee, with pricing usually quoted individually per customer.

• This player would instead be acquired as a one-off purchase, without an ongoing licence fee attached.

• In past deployments, an increase in video relevancy has consistently increased publisher CPMs.

The Sales Process

We are looking to sell this asset within 30 days. We are only selling the IP/asset but will offer one year of service to help with integrations and updates. As stated above, this would be perfect for any publisher-focused business, sell-side ad network or SSP.

If any parties are interested in discussing this in more detail, get in touch: contact@firstpartycapital.com. And on that glorious public notice, we will end there. Stay tuned for the slew of announcements coming your way.

It’s been a busy few weeks. From sizeable M&A deals (LiveRamp, Vibe) to unbearably hot and sweaty industry events, the industry has been running at breakneck speed. As we head into a downtime period - between Cannes and ATS London - this is as good a time as any to discuss the evolving FPC investment thesis.

With Fund 2, we are embarking on an ambitious project to build a counterweight to the dominant US ad tech investment strategy. Overlooked and undervalued opportunities are being missed by the industry at large. This is why we are looking to incubate even more startups focused on non-US, non-China markets. In this edition, we discuss the US ad market and the rationale behind our ROW incubation play.

The US Ad Market: A Dominant Force

The US ad market is the largest in the world. It supports a huge ad tech ecosystem - from vendors to tentpole trade shows to influencers to trade press. It’s why you can have ad networks you’ve never heard of doing 9-digit revenue. Easy when a small US regional market has a bigger programmatic spend than Spain and Portugal combined.

Standalone international markets like the UK and Germany pale in comparison to the sheer might of the US hegemon. It is an obvious draw for Euro ad tech because it is relatively easy to navigate - evolved infrastructure, agreed tech standards and loose privacy laws. American exceptionalism certainly applies to scaled media buys. Ad tech, in its current form, is very much built for the US.

The recent exit of Vibe to Walmart cemented the traditional European ad tech exit: startup goes stateside, hustles hard, raises big, builds a product in a hot area of ad tech (SME CTV), and sells for a billion-plus.

Now if the US is your ultimate objective, do not mess about: you need to get there ASAP. Get backed by Aperiam, Progress Ventures or S4S Ventures. Win the loving embrace of the US ad tech influencers and tastemakers. Get on a podcast with Paparo, Franchi, Zappa, Zawadski. Make friends at AdExchanger, AdWeek, and Digiday. Play the game, as Arthur has done brilliantly. Bravo, sir.

Vibe had the good fortune of being in a strong category at the right time. TVScientific had already sold for $400 million - and there weren’t many other scaled plays to buy. If you are going all in, perhaps think about a Kansas City or Midwestern base - not NYC. There are over 4,000 indie agencies (mostly regional) with significant programmatic spend. Start there, work hard, and success will follow. Follow the MIQ blueprint: regional first, metro second. Lee and G have shown the way.

Incubating Ad Tech Future For ROW

Being a fast follower of US ad tech, where you are essentially arbitraging lower product-build and staffing costs, is a tried-and-tested path. But it comes with its own set of problems.

One, it can be an expensive game to play - and a highly speculative investment strategy - as US expansion requires a lot of capital. Two, it overlooks the huge opportunities outside the US. And three, building for the US alone can be somewhat myopic, limiting non-US startups to tiny TAMs as they chase their over-funded US peers.

This is why there is such a gulf between the US and ROW in terms of exits and investor value. In America, you have an ad market that makes the ad tech layer look massive in comparison with other geos. Mostly because nobody has ever really invested/built beyond that set US-only framework.

FPC (and other funds, to a lesser degree) has now made real investments and allocated resources to ROW ad tech.

FPC has allocated capital in Fund 1 to startups pursuing these unique market opportunities. DigitalAudience and Evorra on the data management and activation side are good examples of this. Both are built from the ground up with privacy at its core - and both make multi-country buys possible.

DigitalAudience has been developing the data spine for European buyers and sellers. It has built tech and billing integrations with all the big platforms and walled gardens. It’s super boring stuff - but necessary infrastructure to scale media buys. With LiveRamp and Lotame now in Publicis’s hands, DA is now one of the most strategic assets in ad tech.

You will see more of this from Fund 2. The FPC incubation model is the logical evolution of this thesis. We will have at least 6 or 7 new incubations in the Fund 2 portfolio.

Why the incubation route? We need to broaden the application of ad tech beyond just a US-only narrative - otherwise we as a fund are leaving money on the table. Look at what is relevant around us and build for that, whether it’s a regulatory shift, data sovereignty, data ownership or a scaled adjacent-industry application.

US and ROW will co-exist, but the divergence we talked about in a previous post is starting to happen - and we are investing for it.

Our strategic investors, such as Index Exchange and DoubleVerify, recognise the opportunity, and we are working together on exciting corporate innovations. And there will be more of these partnerships to announce in the coming six months.

The US ad market will always remain a huge opportunity for our portfolio, but the incubation strategy will take precedence for Fund 2 as we look to build for scaled, localised opportunities (untapped and unloved).

We will provide more details on these incubations in a Q3/Q4 webinar. We are excited about these greenfield projects, as we aim to break new ground.

After a number of years doing this, we feel we are finding FPC’s natural investment position in the $5 trillion marketing industry. To use a crude football analogy, we are like Franz Beckenbauer, evolving from a box-to-box midfielder to sweeper, thereby transforming the game forever. It’s our Der Kaiser moment, if you will.

On that epic World Cup reference, we will leave it there. As ever, reach out if you want to know more about our investment and corporate innovation strategy.

In this episode, Rich is joined by Dave Barr and Nick Fletcher, colleagues at FirstPartyStudio and co-founders of TruTxt, a company incubated through the Studio and backed by FirstPartyCapital. They unpack the “language tax”: the large share of premium publisher traffic that arrives from non-local-language territories and gets monetised poorly, killing engagement, advertiser demand and yields.

We get into:

• Why up to 40–45% of a publisher’s traffic can be in non-local language — and why it’s historically been ignored in the boardroom

• Why Google Translate doesn’t solve it (and actively costs publishers ad signals)

• How TruTxt serves content in the user’s device language under a single URL, sending the right signals into the ad auction to lift display CPMs

• The hidden video opportunity: why publishers switch off video for foreign traffic, and how re-activating and translating it drives the biggest revenue uplift

• Real examples - Brazilian government spending, a global food brand’s “measuring cups” problem, and a Formula One site’s Indian opportunity

• The rev-share, easy-to-integrate, size-agnostic model — and the parallels to Bedrock and the FirstPartyStudio playbook

• The £250k angel round TruTxt is currently raising

The FPC Podcast timeline:

00:00 The State of Publishing Disruption

02:49 Monetising Foreign Traffic

05:41 The Language Tax Explained

08:23 TruTxt vs. Google Translate

11:10 Unlocking Video Monetisation

13:54 Real-World Insights and Case Studies

16:51 Potential Revenue Uplift for Publishers

19:19 Expanding Geographical Reach

22:13 Direct Demand and Future Roadmap

24:58 Details of TruTxt’s Angel Round & Growth Plans

As FPC pens this edition’s missive, the news has broken that Anthropic has raised a Series H (yes, the 8th letter of the alphabet) round of $65B, giving it a post-money valuation of $965 billion. AI may well be the second coming, but you can’t help feeling the arse is going to fall out of this market at some stage. History never repeats; it rhymes.

A combination of corporate pullback and skyrocketing computational cost will no doubt take a rusty hacksaw to darling standalone Frontier LLM companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. FPC is a big believer in the tech, but open-source models will win out in the end.

Do you really want to get trapped by another Silicon Valley behemoth? Absolutely not. That’s why most corporations built on Linux during the OS wars. It’ll be no different here.

AI Can Build Utility For Publishers

It is strange to introduce a piece about “publisher utility” with an AI narrative when these frontier models were built - for free - off the blood, sweat and tears of content producers. No thanks. No compensation. Just fodder for the hyperscalers.

Despite all the negativity, though, AI is starting to present some interesting applications for publishers. FirstPartyCapital has been helping to incubate a new startup that addresses an overlooked part of the publisher inventory stack - with AI as a core capability.

TruTxt launched itself out of FPS this week. Led by Nick Fletcher and Dave Barr, the company aims to turn “distressed” international inventory into higher-yielding premium supply.

It is a big problem both Dave and Nick have seen throughout their long and illustrious careers - and have been busily building a solution over the past six months to help publishers better monetise international traffic.

Ad Tech Alchemy: Turning “Distressed” Into Something Of Value

Premium publishers have long struggled with how to properly monetise international traffic. How best to boost yield on non-native speakers who engage with content? AdSense and house ads are typically the go-to, paying pennies on the dollar/pound/euro/yen/rupee. But that is a terrible waste of attention.

There are publishers in the UK, for instance, with huge traffic in Africa, mostly from their always-on coverage of the Premiership. The traffic often spikes when an African footballer of note has played well - a Salah hat-trick or a Semenyo back-heeled goal. The problem for these publishers is that non-native speakers do not translate into meaningful revenue.

TruTxt is a solution that does real-time translation of publisher content across multiple languages to ensure better pricing. How does it work?

TruTxt has three key components:

1. Scaled translation: Post-ad call, Google Translate can translate most text at a functional level, allowing users to read the content. The issue here is that it doesn’t solve the problem of localising this user for buyers and plugging the signal into the programmatic demand stack. Publishers are making next to nothing in this instance. Now, publishers could build something functional of their own, but they would run into computational problems that make the process insanely expensive. That is where open-source models hosted on O&O servers play a big role in reducing costs. Tough to do. Even harder at scale. TruTxt has built this capability.

2. The signal: One of the big factors weighing on international pricing is the availability of anonymised geo data that can be shared with buyers. Location data is a key part of enriching the international impression. The TruTxt solution plugs this into buyers, maximising yield.

3. The demand stack: Having sales people in the market - from Sau Paiulo to Lagos to Hanoi - selling premium publisher supply (IO, curation and enriching open market inventory) to buyers is a critical piece of the TruTxt proposition. The objective is to build a comprehensive demand stack built around existing programmatic infrastructure, working with globally scaled partners like Index Exchange, on web and app.

Boring, Boring Ad Tech

It’s worth stressing again that boring is beautiful. TruTxt is a new model that does one boring thing really well. This will be a trend from FirstPartyCapital for the rest of the decade.

What can we build that addresses a real problem instead of chasing the latest trend (AI algos, CTV SMB, etc)? What can we build that isn’t necessarily a fast follower of US ad tech solutions developed specifically for the US market? It doesn’t always translate (excuse the pun) to the ROW.

This type of business is not something US ad tech will build anyway because it’s not a priority. In an insanely fragmented non-US market where we operate, TruTxt becomes a critical piece of infrastructure for the world’s biggest publishers.

If you are interested in partnering with TruTxt, reach out to Nick & Dave. We are doing a small seed round right now to help with dev hires and the global rollout. FirstPartyCapital has already invested and will be committing more in the coming months.

Boring, boring ad tech indeed. Have a great ad tech day.

The pod discusses how the deal validates many of the core beliefs behind Audiences, particularly the idea that sensitive first-party data should reside within a brand’s own cloud environment rather than be handed to third-party platforms, and why the deal could trigger both M&A activity and a broader strategic reset, as agencies, publishers, advertisers and data owners rethink who they trust with data infrastructure.

The episode also covers whether LiveRamp’s agency neutrality can survive under Publicis ownership, why RampID may be less powerful outside the US and beyond the open web, and how the convergence of ad tech and cloud infrastructure could open up a new generation of opportunities for companies like Audiences, Bedrock and others in the FirstPartyCapital portfolio.

The FPC Podcast timeline:

00:00 - Introduction and Cannes preview

01:24 - Is Publicis/LiveRamp the new Google / DoubleClick moment?

03:41 - Rob McLaughlin joins the conversation

04:44 - Why LiveRamp made data onboarding matter

07:26 - Can LiveRamp stay neutral under Publicis?

10:00 - Can media holding companies run enterprise software businesses?

11:00 - Why other holdcos may partner rather than buy

12:00 - The “tax” on first-party data

15:04 - Infrastructure, identity and data

17:50 - What brands really think of as data infrastructure

19:10 - Why only a small share of media spend uses first-party data

21:00 - Ad tech meets cloud infrastructure

22:26 - What the deal means for agencies

24:54 - The global impact beyond the US

27:45 - Open internet, open web and RampID’s changing role

29:57 - Audiences’ roadmap and the future of interoperability

30:06 - Agent training and sensitive first-party data

32:48 - Closing thoughts and upcoming episodes

The conversation digs into Bedrock’s recent announcement with Index Exchange, which sees Bedrock’s bidder containerised inside Index Cloud. Shane explains why bringing bid decisioning closer to the impression can dramatically reduce latency, lower infrastructure costs, and unlock more sophisticated use of data, models and signals in real-time media buying.

The team also explores the return of specialist and verticalised bidders, the role of agentic workflows in campaign execution, the importance of composability and standards, and why the next wave of ad tech innovation may come from independent, highly focused players rather than the traditional scaled platforms.

The FPC Podcast timeline:

00:00 - Introduction

Welcome to episode 32 of the FPC Podcast with returning guest Shane Shevlin, CEO and founder of Bedrock Platform.

01:00 - What is Bedrock Platform?

Shane introduces Bedrock as a next-generation media buying platform, with a focus on agentic workflows, automation and composable infrastructure.

02:44 - Bedrock’s Index Cloud announcement

The team discusses Bedrock’s recent partnership with Index Exchange and the significance of containerising Bedrock’s bidder inside Index Cloud.

04:23 - Why containerisation matters

Shane explains the cost, infrastructure and performance benefits of deploying Bedrock’s codebase inside Index’s environment.

07:02 - Collapsing the latency window

A deep dive into how reducing bid decisioning latency from tens of milliseconds to near-instantaneous response times can unlock new capabilities.

09:31 - More signals, better outcomes

Kevin explains how access to more signal data, from geospatial to retail and transactional data, can improve media buying performance.

11:27 - The rise of specialist bidders

The conversation explores how Bedrock’s composable stack could make it easier and cheaper to build verticalised bidders for specific use cases, channels and audiences.

14:15 - What this means for SSPs and DSPs

Ciarán shares his view on whether other SSPs will adopt containerisation, and why Bedrock may occupy a new role in the ecosystem.

17:47 - Composability, portability and standards

Shane and Kevin discuss the importance of open standards, shared infrastructure and collaborative development in the next phase of ad tech.

22:08 - New channels and new optimism

The group discusses emerging environments such as agentic advertising, live sports and high-speed monetisation, and why the market feels exciting again.

23:04 - What has changed in the industry?

Kevin reflects on the technological, financial and cultural shifts that have created a new generation of ad tech challengers.

25:35 - Shane’s experience building bidders

Shane talks about the lessons learned from building multiple bidding systems and how Bedrock is applying that experience to CTV, video, audio and performance.

27:37 - Pathfinder and agentic capabilities

Shane discusses Bedrock’s Pathfinder agents and early client tests around emerging specs and workflows.

28:35 - The thousand-bidder dream returns

Rich closes by reflecting on how Bedrock and Index may bring back the original programmatic dream of many specialist bidders built for different use cases.

29:43 - Next episode preview

A preview of the next FPC Podcast episode, featuring Rob McLaughlin of Audiences and a discussion of the Publicis-LiveRamp announcement.

Attention, readers. The following is a PSA (Public Service Announcement). The Cannes Social is returning on Tuesday, June 23. FirstPartyCapital is again partnering with ExchangeWire to host one of the great networking events of our age. We will be back at our spiritual home in Cannes, Ma Nolans.

The whole pub will be rented out for the great and good of the industry to discuss the latest trends and, of course, close massive deals (bring those sales contracts). Prepare yourself for zeitgeisty, geeky Cannes revelry. Thousands signed up last year to attend. If you want to go this year, sign up using the link below.

I want to go to The Cannes Social

Thanks to The Cannes Social sponsors - Picnic, Silverpush and Screencore - for making this event possible. The people of ad tech (and post-ad tech) salute you. If you are looking to support the largest get-together at Cannes, then send an email to sales@thewirecorp.com for more information. Incredible reach and scaled brand equity guaranteed.

We all look forward to seeing you there.

This week, ad tech LinkStagram - taking a deserved break from selfies, self-promotion and meandering emoji-filled AI-produced posts - blew up with the news that Publicis acquired LiveRamp. It was a big “spin out” moment for indie ad tech.

LiveRamp provides a lot of the onboarding and ID graph plumbing for the industry. So, it’s going to be a big story, right? Absolutely, if you are in the US. LiveRamp has a tiny footprint outside the US, from a revenue and tech perspective. More on that later.

The economics of the deal were decent - 12x EBITDA is not bad given the company’s weak growth. If you were looking for a chunky multiple on the topline, you clearly missed the changing M&A dynamics. Increasingly, deals are being done on EBIDTA multiples.

It’s Not Ad Tech; It’s An AI Thing

It was interesting how Publicis explained this acquisition: specifically, to accelerate data co-creation for smarter agents. They described LiveRamp as an interoperable collaboration platform connecting data across all major cloud environments, with a network of 25,000 publishers and more than 500 data and technology partners.

It isn’t ad tech anymore; it’s the foundational layer to something bigger. It is something we have been ruminating on at FPC for a while now. The standout companies in Fund 1 - the ones that will exit for decent money - are data and infrastructure companies. And the companies in Fund 2 are even more focused on proprietary data and the tooling to maximise value.

As we move to an ecosystem where software is no longer a moat, you need to lean into the true differentiator: 1st-party data. In this edition of The FirstPartyCapital Newsletter, we discuss the new post-ad tech ecosystem and how a $1 trillion industry became a $5 trillion one.

The $5 Trillion Attention Economy - Yes, Please

Ad tech has always had a stupidly narrow view of itself - effectively, a tech layer servicing open (browser-based) web display advertising. Fortunes have been made and careers defined. But the world has moved on since the humble web banner was first served all those years ago. Walled gardens have eaten up a sizeable share, and the LLMs are now savaging the corpse of a once mighty part of the media landscape.

When we launched the fund, we talked about the $1 trillion ad industry - and how ad tech powered that. It felt like a stretch, but it was necessary. The industry has done itself a disservice by downplaying its importance. And now it’s getting hammered for it. The decline in public stocks is indicative of this. Investors hate ad tech. The dominant narrative right now: ad tech is tethered to a dying open web. Wall Street always needs a believable thesis to build a positive valuation story.

All of this is lamentably lazy, reductive thinking. FPC believes we now live in a post-ad tech world, where the opportunity has shifted from outdated mediation to a data-and-infrastructure story. Our best prospects and future investments will power a $5 trillion industry comprising advertising, media and content, marketing technology and agency services, retail and commerce media, and the creator economy - all connected by data infrastructure (identity, measurement, and signal) that makes all of it work.

It’s also important to note the critical importance of developing solutions for walled gardens - especially for ROW. They are even more entrenched outside the US. If you are not building for omnichannel in a post-ad tech context, your opportunity will be severely limited in this $5 trillion economy.

Who Are You?

Is this an identity (excuse the pun) crisis for FPC and the industry at large? Yes. It’s difficult to let go of something that has served you so well. Ad tech is a badge of honour for most, but its rigid definition has become a millstone around the industry’s neck. You only have to take a cursory look around to understand the new lay of the land: shrinking supply chains, walled-garden hegemony, holdcos moving to outcomes-based business models, the decline of managed service, and (rightly) challenged margins. Companies can play in a post-ad tech world, but they need a fundamental step change.

From an FPC perspective, our investment thesis has had to evolve in line with these seismic changes. We are staying away from media business models, as they will remain challenged and constrained by agencies seeking greater control. Does the world need more algorithm-based optimisation ad nets or LLM-powered planning tools? We think not.

To be frank, readers, there is a severe paucity of ideas out there right now - hence why we are incubating more startups. That could be coloured by how we increasingly see our own place in the ecosystem. The US produces great ad tech, but we don’t want to be fast followers, hoping a larger US company will acquire our portcos.

Ultimately, it doesn’t optimise for good financial outcomes. For Fund 2, we are looking at more progressive and innovative ideas - building on our unique strengths in this part of the world (and there are quite a few).

A Divergence In US & Non-US Ad Tech

In this post-ad tech world, there will be divergence between the US and ROW. The US has the biggest ad market in the world. Even if independent ad tech can retain a foothold, the opportunity will be large enough to be interesting.

Non-US companies will flock to the “glitz and glamour” of Possible and CES to try to own a piece of the pie. And they absolutely should if that is their MO. But factors like data sovereignty, national interests (government mandates to use local tech), and compliance will act as a buffer to global scale. US ad tech isn’t built for this. The irony now is that US scale does not equal global scale.

FPC sees a whole new ecosystem emerging outside the US across areas such as compliance infrastructure, sovereign tech, regulated industries, vertical platforms, and adjacent data businesses. This post-ad tech landscape will be tricky for traditional ad tech to navigate. And if you think this is a throwaway statement, look at the revenue breakdown of the big ad tech cos - US versus ROW. This is why LiveRamp didn’t work internationally: it’s a US ad tech company that never really adapted to the global market.

This deserves a white paper, which we will put together before Cannes, as it is a meaty enough subject to warrant a deeper analytical dive. It will become central to our fund thesis going forward.

If you think this is a break-up letter to ad tech, you are mistaken. For FPC, it's about the necessary evolution of a critical sector that we belive has massive upside in the years to come.

And that’s it for this edition. Welcome to the first day of the post-ad tech world. As Joe Strummer once asked on The Clash’s “Clampdown”: “What are we going to do now?” A ton of new stuff should be your instinctive reply.

The FPC Podcast timeline:

• The FastPay reunion and what OAREX has built since (170 clients, ~$5bn of ad spend processed).

• The $5M worked example - what a properly blended raise actually looks like on the cap table.

• The hidden upside: with debt in place, founders pick the right investor, not just the highest bidder.

• Ciarán on weaponising payment terms - AdSense, Trade Desk, and the bank inside every ad tech business.

• The founder mistakes Rich, and Matt keep watching: waiting too long, signing the wrong contracts, and assuming “debt is expensive” without doing the maths.

Andrew closes the loop on what he told us last June: that the market needed to move past duplicative platform work and reprice infrastructure to near zero. Index Cloud is the productisation of that thesis, and Bedrock, paired with it, is the first real-world proof that a small, focused DSP can listen to the entire internet at scale and compete on value-add rather than access to capital.

The FPC Podcast timeline:

00:00 Introduction to the FPC Podcast and Guests

01:06 Recap of Possible and Index Cloud Announcement

03:24 Understanding Index Cloud and Its Innovations

07:05 Performance Improvements and Cost Reductions

12:19 The Future of Ad Tech and Market Dynamics

15:51 Turning Points in Ad Tech and DSP Opportunities

20:59 Challenges in Live Sports and QPS Management

25:17 The Role of Containerisation in Ad Tech

30:00 The Open Internet vs. Walled Gardens

34:48 The Future of Collaboration in Ad Tech

The FPC Podcast timeline:

00:00 Introduction to the Ad Tech Ecosystem

01:28 The Evolution of Ad Tech Infrastructure

03:53 The Rise of Containerised DSPs

07:34 AdTech Innovations in Live Streaming

09:53 Margin Compression in Ad Tech

14:32 Investing in Innovative Ad Tech Solutions

20:02 Technical Difficulties and Communication Challenges

21:00 Investment Convictions in Ad Tech

22:02 The Role of Bedrock in Ad Tech Innovation

24:49 Cloud Computing and Data Privacy in Ad Tech

27:51 The Importance of First-Party Data

30:46 Lumen’s Role in Attention Measurement

34:02 Future Trends in Ad Tech and Closing Remarks