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

Hello readers. We took a little break from writing the newsletter for a few weeks. It’s all quality here, not quantity. We are not in the business of news analysis or rehashing other people’s work. Faux zeitgeisty narrative is a definite no. Original ad tech material, only - to paraphrase the lyrical genius of The Streets on Let’s Push Things Forward.

The day-to-day has also been a contributing factor to our mini hiatus: we’ve been busy incubating a bunch of new ad tech businesses, which will be a huge feature of Fund 2 (more on that thesis at a later date). Some exciting left-field solutions are coming your way very soon.

Bedrock Platform: The True (Only) Heir To IPONWEB & AppNexus

The subject of this week’s edition was originally an incubated startup within FPC and is now building the most innovative, bleeding-edge programmatic ad tech in the business. We are, of course, talking about Bedrock Platform.

In case you missed it, Bedrock Platform announced a new innovation in ad tech, the containerised DSP. In partnership with Index Exchange, Bedrock has built a highly efficient, cost-effective way to execute programmatic buys on the sell side.

Now you might be asking: what is containerisation, and why should it matter to buyers? Those would be excellent questions.

Before we tackle those queries, though, it’s important to talk about the collapse of this laughable buyside/sell-side demarcation. SSPs compete with legacy DSPs, and legacy DSPs compete with SSPs. End of.

Just have a cursory look at SSP open roles - mostly demand-focused gigs. The narrative of “one platform” and “mono access” dominates. For SSPs, all the growth is direct access for brands and agencies.

There is a caveat to this trend, though: the modern DSP/buying platform. Instead of a monolithic DSP stack, you have a composable framework where Bedrock Platform becomes the tech layer for its customers’ optimisation or data. In short, it is a malleable technology layer that can run anywhere.

Containerisation is the perfect manifestation of this - especially in the context of DSP/SSP dynamics. Bedrock Platform can now run its bidder within the Index tech stack, hosting the buying logic alongside the inventory.

This allows Index Exchange to remain wholly aligned with the sell-side-first, and Bedrock can independently serve its buy-side customers. It’s a strange ecosystem indeed - but somehow this works.

Containerisation goes way beyond clunky, invariably unworkable DSP-to-SSP deal-ID activation. It is beautifully efficient and performant by comparison.

FPC was going to explain all this with a crude visual, but luckily, Bedrock Platform has done an excellent job in articulating the complexity in this magnificent video explanation (see below).

What This Means For Performance & Margin Retention

This is a big deal. Hosting the Bedrock Platform bidder inside Index’s infrastructure increases performance and win rates for buyers. There is zero latency and data leakage. That has huge implications in ad performance, putting it on par with walled gardens.

A major attraction of containerisation is margin retention. It will be significantly cheaper to use a Bedrock/Index instance than to use a buy-side stack to activate programmatic buys.

Driving down infrastructure costs will have big P&L implications for principal media buyers or ad networks running IOs/deal IDs. Readers might scoff/tut-tut at such a reductive view of the industry. Ultimately, money talks.

When you layer in omnichannel supply access and easy-to-use agentic capabilities, you now have the ultimate trading tool.

Agencies, Ad Nets & Onboarders: Time To Move To Bedrock Platform (Natch!)

If you are in the margin game, it’s hard to see how a legacy DSP can make sense. For a big global FMCG or any scaled global brand, the traditional DSP makes perfect sense. This will always be a huge chunk of the market.

For others, though, like ad nets, principal media buyers or big media cos looking to buy their own supply, the logic isn’t there.

The recent spat between TTD and Publicis was not about “hidden fees”; it was about where the margin will go. Buy-side DSPs plus principal media buying just don’t work - especially if you want campaigns to perform.

Margin is existential for ad nets: they need to optimise for EBIDTA to have any chance of an acquisition; an extra couple of percentage points will make all the difference in a liquidity event.

Media companies buying their own supply (from RMNs to big-scale pubs to streamers to apps) via a DSP will always be constrained by an inflated DSP take rate.

That won’t be the only reason to switch, though: building on legacy solutions with fixed and inflexible product roadmaps makes it harder to stay competitive.

There are very few (if any). solutions built specifically for the “ad tech middle” - a constituency that was once well served by AppNexus and IPONWEB. But no longer.

The “Ad Tech Middle” is frustrated by the lack of innovation and the self-serving business interests of the current ad tech offerings.

The ATM is invariably seen as a “nice to have” customer segment, just not business-critical.

There is a big gap in ad tech capability. Bedrock Platform is filling that void. FPC is excited to see such a real prospect emerge from the European ad tech ecosystem. And the upside has only begun.

The no-brainer move now: test Bedrock Platform offering; start to reclaim agency over your tech and economic future.

It’s all about the Ad Tech Middle FTW.

And on the public service notice, we will leave it there, readers. Have a great ad tech day.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Carney delivered a seminal speech on the “middle powers” absolute necessity to take greater agency over their geopolitical futures.

The crux of his argument: that there has been an overdependence on the big global powers, and now is the time to untether from overbearing hegemons and build a new partnership of equals - reclaiming some semblance of control.

It’s probably a stretch to use a similar analogy in ad tech, but that’s what we do here on The FPC Newsletter. The tenuous links are expected.

The GAM (Google, Amazon and Meta) Effect

The hyperscalers continue to run roughshod over our great industry (examples are too many to list here). The 20 percenters are under siege.

Through a combination of overwhelming scale, walled-garden shenanigans, and impressive execution, they have taken a sizeable slice of the market. Despite their best efforts, though, the independent ad tech industry is still thriving.

The continued growth of established players and the emergence of new, scaled ad businesses are proving that the world is much bigger than Google, Amazon and Meta.

Maybe it’s best we all acquiesce to these scaled ad tech powers. Seems like a safe partnership, right? Seems like a bullet-proof economic model? Undoubtedly, it’s the partnership your mother would approve of.

Time To Go Your Own Way

In summary, it’s a no-brainer decision to outsource all tech capability to GAM. Sure, right up until your - invariably low margin - dependable business model gets upended by a high-octane Silicon Valley product team or a PowerPoint-loving exec looking to leave a mark. Or worse, a panicked, burn-the-house-down mega-industry pivot.

You could instead take your cue from Mark Carney: go your own way and build something more durable (in cooperation with the best and brightest in ad tech).

FirstPartyCapital believes that owning your commercial and tech future is, in the long term, the inherently more sensible path. And it would seem some of the smartest industry operators agree.

Corporate Partnership Framework Is Resonating

Since launching our new corporate partnership initiative, we have received some interesting outreach. Just a recap on the new corporate offering - in case you haven’t seen it:

• Outsourced R&D: Access our engineers (FirstPartyStudio) to build bespoke data/ad tech solutions without the massive overhead.

• Strategic Equity: Gain a seat at the table and co-invest in category-leading ad tech alongside our 250+ industry LPs.

• Market Intel: Quarterly briefings on AI, M&A, and non-US infrastructure shifts to keep you abreast of industry trends that affect your business.

So why are these strategics looking to work with FPC directly?

An unparalleled - and, yes, unbiased - view of the non-US ad tech world. Product development deep dives. Cutting-edge ad tech co-builds. Unique deal flow. Access to the most innovative ad tech startups. Take your pick.

Ultimately, it boils down to one word: autonomy. That’s what a vibrant industry needs, and that’s what we want to offer our partners.

We are open to speaking with smart, forward-looking corporate investors and partners. If that’s you, drop us a line at contact@firstpartycapital.com.

Sign Up For The Vendi Tech Webinar - March 23

As you know, we are doing a syndicate raise for ad tech HALO champion, Vendi Tech.

The OOH starlet is one of our best prospects for Fund 2.

Here we outline our reasons why this unique OOH and retail media crossover solution is very investible: https://newsletter.firstpartycapital.com/p/ad-tech-value-investment-why-we-are.

We will be hosting a webinar with Vendi Tech CEO, Harry Maitland-Titterton, on Mar 23. He will give a deep dive on the Vendi Tech opportunity and will field questions from potential investors. You can sign up here to book your Vendi Tech spot: https://tinyurl.com/VendiTech.

And that’s it for this edition. Have a great ad tech day.

Hello readers, and welcome to another edition of the FirstPartyCapital newsletter. The SaaSpocalypse has had a huge impact on software company valuations. This collapse in value happened mostly because of tools released by Claude and other LLMs, which automated tasks, reduced headcount needs, and forced a pivot toward AI-driven efficiency.

The public markets have taken a chainsaw to companies perceived to be at risk from the rise of vibe-coded dopplegangers. The rationale: with Claude and other LLMs, it’s now relatively easy to build software that can scale to the size of Salesforce et al.

HALO

Obviously, if you discount the deep integrations into some of the biggest companies in the world, the army of salespeople (to sell it), the army of developers (to develop and maintain it), the marketing, and all the rest of the things that go into running a multi-billion dollar software company, that would be a very sound thesis. But it isn’t.

Regardless, investors are rotating aggressively out of traditional SaaS stocks and into more durable assets. This investment trend even has a new acronym, HALO. No, not the Texas MOR pop gem from the late 90s.

HALO stands for Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence. The crux of this new Wall Street thesis is the following: the market has shifted from “asset-light” software companies toward “real-world” infrastructure, and while AI can replace code, it cannot replace a physical railroad, power grid, or oil refinery. Heavy infrastructure-based stuff wins basically.

Could this happen in ad tech? In this newsletter, we discuss the HALO effect, why OOH is the trade and why we are investing in startups like Vendi.

OOH, The Ultimate HALO Play

You could argue, right now, that OOH is a far more interesting channel than CTV. Web-based ad tech has packed up shop and bet the farm on winning a share of the CTV ad pie. It’s become a massively overcrowded space that’s increasingly dominated by the hyperscalers.

OOH, on the other hand, has not seen the same level of hype as CTV, despite seeing over $2 billion in M&A in 2025 and expected growth of 7%-8% per year until the mid-2030s. It’s still relatively open in terms of opportunity. Innovation can still win.

But what’s really interesting is the channel’s robustness in the face of AI disruption. It is the ultimate HALO channel. Here are a few snackable reasons as to why it’s an essential go-to for marketers in an age of unpredictable AI change:

• Real-world scarcity FTW: AI can create infinite websites and digital ads instantly, but it cannot vibe-code a new junction, making existing physical signs more valuable as digital space collapses.

• The trusted channel: In a world flooded with fake AI-slop content and growing trust issues, owning a massive physical billboard signals that a brand is legitimate, solvent, and has the resources to operate offline.

• The emotional quotient: In a media landscape fragmented into a million pieces, brand equity is hard to come by. The billboard becomes a watercooler moment - the ultimate mid-to-upper funnel moment that drives the user to the prompt. The ultimate brand building and HALO crossover.

• Part of our real-world landscape: While AI agents now automatically hide or summarise digital ads for users, they cannot “block” a massive physical structure standing in the real world as you pass.

• Infrastructure built over decades: While social media apps and websites go viral and die within months, these steel-and-glass structures are integrated into infrastructure, providing a predictable source of longevity for media buyers.

Vendi - Our Latest HALO investment

This, of course, segues beautifully into the syndicate fund raise we are currently running for Vendi Tech. Vendi provides “smart” vending machines to some of the UK’s largest pub, gym, and retail brands.

It produces automated product dispensers and works with brands to distribute physical products to targeted audiences. It then uses this first-party data to power a DOOH offering.

Fixed physical asset - with utility - serving a non-intrusive DOOH display. Vendi is the ultimate HALO play. The more you think about this, the more you realise how valuable companies like Vendi will become - as people seek out real-world spaces (pubs, gyms and retail) to escape the AI-powered digital pollution that dominates daily life.

The Vendi Tech deal is now live here: https://investors.firstpartycapital.com/deal/detail/bf795272-1906-42b1-b223-630dc2563820. It’s time,e you had an AI hedge.

FPC Fund 2 will be making an investment after we finish this syndicate round. Here are the reasons why we are investing:

• Vendi sits at the intersection of retail media and OOH. It is already working with major gym, pub, and retail brands, helping build new incremental revenue streams through its automated vending machines. Its product-dispensing solution enables brands to engage a targeted audience. Layer on top of that a data-driven OOH ad network, and you have a sticky, profitable ad tech play. Once embedded, it’s hard to displace.

• The Vendi Team: Harry Maitland-Titterton, Vendi CEO, has extensive experience in the retail sector. This led him to identify a significant market gap in the automated vending machine space. He launched Vendi in 2023 and has since signed several major retail brands. As the product evolved to a first-party data and OOH solution, Harry surrounded himself with some of the smartest people in ad tech.

• Vendi is primed for scale. The company has nailed the unit economics on its machines and has built its ad stack to help brands reach new audiences. Now its core customers want it to expand into Europe and beyond. Honestly, it is hard not to get excited about Vendi - and the opportunity that lies ahead for Harry and team. This is a proper, moat-heavy industrial ad tech. Steel, glass, product and OOH ads. Ridiculously investable.

• The best companies in ad tech are utility solutions with a margin-heavy and scalable ad business bolted on. Think Uber and PayPal - but for OOH. As with its peers, Vendi’s utility feeds into its advertising offering.

• Vendi is quintessential ad tech value investing. With a unique fixed supply and proprietary party data, Vendi is a business with a higher likelihood of delivering a return to investors.

• From an M&A perspective, the OOH space is buoyant. In 2025, there were over $2 billion in transactions. OOH is a growing sector. In the age of chatbots and Q&A search engines, OOH becomes existential for brand building as the lower funnel collapses into a prompt.

• EIS cover on this deal for UK investors. Tax rebates are available on this raise.

Access The Vendi Deal Here

And that’s it, readers. Have a great weekend. Stay safe.

The FPC Podcast timeline:

00:00 Introduction to FPC and Corporate Innovation

02:08 The FPC Stack and Its Evolution

06:07 Corporate Partnerships and Innovation Strategies

09:55 Market Intelligence and Insights

17:59 Addressing Challenges in Ad Tech and Publishing

22:08 Incubation and Future Innovations