Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
It seems that the telecommunications companies are not yet poisoned by advertising technology.
On Monday, T-Mobile announced plans to acquire Vistar Media, an advertising platform that specializes in digital out-of-home (DOOH). T-Mobile will pay approximately $600 million in cash and expects the deal to close within the next few months, pending regulatory approval.
Digital campaigns should account for more than one-third of the $10 billion eMarketer expects buyers to spend on OOH media by 2027. DOOH in particular is having a moment as a competitive advertising channel and therefore so many startups have cropped use the gray area between OOH video and connected TV.
In the Vistar Media acquisition, “we see a tremendous opportunity to deliver relevant and personalized advertising,” JP Colaco, SVP and head of T-Mobile’s advertising business, said in a statement.
Stay on target
DOOH ads may not be targeted to individuals, but that doesn’t mean these campaigns lack digital-style targeting and measurement.
T-Mobile’s scaled mobile subscriber base, combined with Vistar’s media partnerships and OOH technology, “means advertisers can easily place their ads where they know their audience will be,” Colaco said.
Use of OOH advertising technologies display multipliersa reach metric based on how many unique mobile devices pass a particular display or digital billboard at different times of the day. And T-Mobile has reams of first-party data about its broadband subscriber base.
If an advertiser is trying to reach consumers in a certain area who enjoy gardening or crocheting, they could hypothetically use a combination of mobile app downloads and location data to target specific locations or screens in the real world where that target audience can be found.
The acquisition of Vistar is also a sign that ad tech is still attractive to telcos. There’s a long trend of telcos acquiring media and ad tech startups before eventually reversing their decisions, including AT&T’s Xandro (which sold to Microsoft in 2021), Verizon’s media business including AOL and Yahoo (which was later sold to Apollo Funds) and Singaporean telco Singtel acquisition of demand platform Amobee (what moved to the Nexxen advertising platform in 2022).
T-Mobile, which bought a ride-sharing startup Octopus in 2022 and an advertising technology company focused on mobile devices PushSpring in 2019bucks the trend.
It doesn’t matter whether T-Mobile keeps Vistar for the long haul another story. But for now, consider this the first big ad tech acquisition of 2025.