And then how did that condition the process of sort of thinking about, well, who could buy this and why would they want it? If you can speak to those details. I think some of the things we can talk to, I mean,

Azerian wanted to come into the UK, it made a couple of acquisitions, but the UK is a really important market to the business. And it's the number one digital market in Europe. So they definitely had appetite to invest further in the UK. So we had good publisher relationships. We had strong creative product, healthy revenue, health and balance sheet. So from that point of view, there was a nice fit. But there were also some tech that we built, the creative studio that we built, that enables us to craft a thesis for them that we kind of went to them and said, hey, these are the things that seem to make sense to us. And I think that's pretty important to think through, especially if you're a first-time CEO. Why is someone going to buy this business? And try and put yourself in their shoes rather than so easy to be consumed by the products themselves. So proprietary technology,

geography, and customer relationships, essentially. And I imagine Undertone, not so different. I mean, there's, you know, also the sort of creative technology was probably a factor, relationships.

Yeah, yeah. In no particular order, that stuff. And, you know, this was a somewhat of a special situation because this was a business in Parion that had a core business that was not growing at the rate that they desired or that market desired. So they wanted to make a big bet and a big bet that was different than their business, which was search distribution. So if you think about the customer segment for search distribution, it's like performance-based marketerists that are looking to expand search. And if you think back to what the undertone business was increasingly, consistently as today, it's just like brand and creative formats. So they wanted to make a big bet that was in a completely different segment and a completely different market. This was a Teleview based company and they wanted obviously the customer relationships and the team and the brand and everything like that. So this was all of that plus like a very specific, you know, direction that the acquirer wanted to go into. It's

super interesting because when you think about the Parion and Azirian comp, you have two companies that are sort of acquisitive, that have looked for these complementary assets. And there's an obvious case there in the sense that you can sort of round out the picture. But the challenge then is you end up with something that can risk being like a mishmash. So how do you then find sort of the one or two threads that are going to pull everything together? And I think for Azerian, curation would probably be the number one term that you guys have used to tie everything together, given the strengths in data and audience building and all the different technologies you guys own, DSP, SSB, DMP, like putting all that together to offer customers something that's greater than the whole of its parts. Just to sort of speak to Ari's point, first of all, I

think, you know, kind of the experience you were talking about just talks to the legitimacy of M&A as a strategic way to grow the business. And I think that's become much more of a thing for want of a better way of putting it, you know, over the last decade, but maybe it was before, and we're just seeing it now nonstop. I mean, there's been the DV rocker box, but just more and more of it. And in a market that's kind of where growth is maybe not as fast as you might hope, and where everything's getting more competitive, scale really matters, and acquisition is the fastest way to scaling. You know, there's no doubt about that. To your point, Joe, you're 100% right. You need a thread that you can pull all the way through. The way that we've tended to think about these things is, what is the right balance between something that is economically interesting, but strategically attractive so that our go-to narrative is broadly unchanged and we're adding functionality, we're adding people and revenue and so on without constantly having to recreate the narrative. So, we've really worked hard on that. And to sort of your point, you know, we own the full stack, but the center of the discussion we have in the US is really around the DMP and building custom audiences for advertisers to solve, you know, ground or performance challenges. And it's things that are strategic to that, that we're really looking for. Well,

I also think when you, when you are acquisitive, when you have so many different assets in so many different countries, you can see the whole picture and put it together for, for agencies, you can help them find those global omni-channel audiences and get the best of those audiences for whatever they want to achieve. So curation, especially if you have the DMP technology, becomes a sort of natural synthetic thread for a business of Azerian's kind. And it's a very strong thread for us in the US and the UK. The interesting

thing just on that question is that if you're a seller sitting in the US trying to sell your business, narrow and deep, single, very clear kind of product proposition works really, really well. And in Europe, it's almost the opposite. You can become a bolt-on because the market sizing is so different. You can be acquired by someone who's a bolt-on and the networking is so strong that you can go to a business and say, hey, we've just acquired this. It's all good. No one queries it. But here in the US, if it's not strategic and doesn't fit in, then it just becomes extremely confusing. So the way that you can think about acquiring or selling really varies depending on whether you're predominantly European or

predominantly North American. When US-based companies think about strategic M&A, they think about product, they think about filling gaps. When US-based companies think about international expansion, they think about Europe. Yeah. Right? So it's an interesting box that you put in it. Not in every case, right? There's like DV side bits where it's actually the reverse, but it tends be the case but

generally yeah so i mean our business isn't sort of universally the same in um uh in europe and and you'd kind of expect that with 20 plus markets um and a business that was that was built on acquisition but but the common thread of sort of uh omni channel performance audiences cell-side curation you know there are common threads all the way through but there aren't nuances between it. Also,

we should state that I probably should have said up front that Azirian is a sharpened client, which is part of how I'm sort of clued into your narrative.

I mean, this is like, again, this is, again, total proof that a whole social media approach, Joe, works. Because we first connected on LinkedIn after you read something, and I was like that is the best way to describe how we should think about pr that i've read in like the last decade so let's talk and

that's how we met we met in the same way that you guys met um do you have any war stories from the from the transaction you can you can think about if you've ever been involved in a deal there's moment, literally every deal where it looks like it's going to crash. Everybody hates each other. Everybody's got problems. Literally, every M&A transaction goes through at least one of those moments. It's not more of them. So there's a guy I know who was pretty significant at Liberty Global. And I

was telling him we were trying to do this transaction. And this is exactly what he said to me. He was like, there's going to be a moment. But you'll get through it, don't worry. There's going to be a moment. But in particular, someone on our side got cold feet at one point in time. And at the 11th hour, one of the shareholders was, I don't know if this is right. And as it was, we kind of got over the line. But there was that heart in mouth moment of like, we have come so far. And for every other shareholder, this means so much to get this done. But anyway, I mean, we got there in the end, but there was a real moment of

the shareholder has to agree, otherwise it's not going to happen. Matt, as someone who's done a lot of deals, do you think people in general are actually too afraid to walk away as a means of leverage. Like I'm thinking about there's a particular ad tech founder. I've heard this about that he has a pattern of sort of walking away from deals when they're nearly done as a means of leverage. And that strikes me as unusual because I think it's actually kind of out of step with human nature. I think most people actually like once they get something going, they really want to make it happen. And they're sort of afraid to make that kind of move. So I'm curious, having done a lot of deals, just what your perspective is on that. I mean,

deals 100% need momentum. I mean, that's probably the single biggest thing. And the more that you don't break down the problems and you create that situation, the easier it is, especially because from a sort of buy side perspective, like there are always things on the table there are always choices that you can make and you know we we had a you know a sense of hey they could probably buy five other companies here so we need to get this deal done but there is also another tourism you know that there's there's always one guy that's sitting around the table the one's a bigger number than everyone else and it's whether you can kind of get that piece over the line that becomes, I think, part of the challenge. But we've mostly completed things we wanted to complete, I think. Because I think people realize it's hard. I mean, if that's really the goal of setting up the business to return something to the shareholders and get it sold, it's tough. And you probably get one or two opportunities to do that. And it's a big call to walk away from those opportunities, unless you're really growing fast. It's interesting to think about the

vectors in the space right now, along which acquisitions will happen for those complementary purposes we were talking about. So what I mean is like, we were talking about, you know, geography as an obvious reason, expanding to a new market, someone having relationships that you don't have. Eric mentioned that in the undertone Perrion case, there was also the brand, sort of brand advertiser, performance advertiser piece. And obviously, technology can be related to that, not just relationships. And we see that's what's happening with DV and Cybids a couple of years ago. And then now DV and Rockerbox, it seems, is like they want to, you know, these quality companies aligning, if I do say so myself with the thesis of the outcomes era, are trying to prove that they can drive performance so that they can at least measure and then help their clients optimize on performance, not just do ad verification. So I would say brand performance and like performance quality or outcomes quality are like two of the sort like tension points where a lot of players in the space will be looking to find something complementary to what they already do.

I think there's an argument that there's something else as well going on, which is that there is now a moment of old ad tech and new ad tech. And new ad tech, and I'm thinking about whatever scope three are going to let out of the box in a couple of weeks, for example, or, you know, or a chalice or, you know, some of the, you know, what index are up to, they are creating, I think, a paradigm shift in what's going on. And then you've got a bunch of businesses that are maybe 10 years in or 15 years in that you might think of as old ad tech who are trying to reinvent themselves to keep the growth going. And I think that's also one reason that you sort of see a lot of these kinds of acquisitions, because it's pretty hard to reinvent after 15 years. You know, an acquisition is a, you know, Cybit's maybe a good example of that, you know, and possibly the DV Rockabox piece today. I mean, I don't know what you think, Eric, but I've not heard it that way. But someone said that to me this morning. I was like, oh, that's a great way

to put it. Yeah. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective either. And there's, I think, you know, there's basically like three things here. It's what you said, Joe, with like the meta, right, of, of companies that are either quality needing to get more connected to outcomes or vice versa. step, which is where are the holes that I can fill in my business? To your point, it could be geographic, it could be customer, but for a lot of companies you would consider old ad tech, it could be like retail media or CTV. And then to your point, probably the most extreme end state and maybe scary for a business that's got real scale is the old ad tech versus the new ad tech in this thing is completely changing before our eyes with the way the programmatic ecosystem is being like re-architected, let alone what is coming down the pipe right now with new ways of doing things driven by AI and then consumers doing things really differently, leading to an unknown advertising and marketing experience with, you know, platform-based

AI. There's a real chance it's the next two years are going to be transformational and the next two years are going to set the scene for the next decade for our tech. Yeah. Which makes me think that, you know, the pace of M&A has to be like, you know, really, really high. I think it's going to come on more. Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you for all sorts of reasons, but mainly scale and change. And just the sign of the market, you know, despite everything that's, you know, getting spent, the economy is only growing at, it's just not growing at the pace everyone might like.

Well, I think the old versus new paradigm that's emerging is happening because we are at this generational period. Like, I really think, and this is a big deal, you know, if you look at the history of the industry, we could talk about like ad tech 1.0 being like, you know, 2010-ish or whatever. And like, we're in ad tech 2.0. Like, that's how big a moment it is, is like, this is like the second big generational, you know, we're at the incipient moment of the next generation of ad tech. And I think something that's complicated, like Matt, you and I've been talking about this. Like if you look at a company like the trade desk, if they are going to be significantly disrupted, you know, they have a huge market lead in terms of being an independent DSP, you know, putting aside DV360. Yeah. And Amazon, The way that that disruption would probably happen is that a new media buying paradigm emerges driven by AI that just like totally sidesteps them. It's not like another DSP is going to like make a couple tweaks. Other DSPs can chip away at their margins, but probably not like overtake them and sort of reverse the dynamics. But if you have a wholly new competitor, like something driven by AI agents or whatever, that could change the leadership board. And then it's also, can a company like the Trade Desk just acquire their way out of that? I don't know.

I mean, I think that's right. I mean, you could think about it as you had networks, then you have programmatic. Now it's kind of AI is going to be the next transformational change. And I agree. This is horse to car. It's not fast to horse. And I think that's the sort of the paradigm shift we're going to see. Something is going to emerge out of AI, out of retooling, rethinking the architecture that's going to look very different. It's not going to look like, you know, an old DSP, you know, in that instance. And I mean, TTD have got tons of scale and you've got like hats off respect, everything that they've built, but it's hard for companies to reinvent themselves. I mean, Google is still predominantly a search business, right? So I think that's right. I think that could be the, we're on the edge of a tipping point of a lot of change. And I think the second thing you might think about is that the pace at which innovation is adopted is getting faster and faster and faster. And I sort of think to the advent of the internet, and then you think to something like header beating and how quickly the uptake was on that. And then you think about Andrew Casali's comments on the uptake of curation, the speed at which these things are innovation adoption, if you like, is getting faster and faster.