Ad Tech Briefing: A mid-term report card

The company cited “market conditions” after a sharp selloff across software stocks, with more than $800 billion wiped from the S&P 500 software and services index since late January. That retrenchment followed earnings from Alphabet and Amazon, which, while showing sizeable revenue gains, unnerved investors about the scale of capital expenditure required to fund AI infrastructure. The reaction underscored a broader re-rating: top-line growth alone was insufficient if accompanied by margin pressure and escalating compute costs.

Against that backdrop, LiveRamp emerged as a relative outlier. Its Q4 results featured comparatively modest revenue growth by sector standards, yet the market rewarded its capital discipline and shareholder signaling, including a $200 million expansion of its share buyback. In an environment skeptical of SaaS multiples, LiveRamp’s performance suggested that predictable cash flows and measured AI positioning could still command investor confidence.

AppLovin surges, but tumbles

By contrast, AppLovin — arguably the talisman of the ad tech cohort — delivered one of the most striking earnings prints of the season. The company reported a 66% year-over-year increase in Q4 revenue to $1.66 billion, beating analyst expectations of $1.6 billion. First-quarter guidance of $1.75 billion to $1.78 billion also topped consensus estimates. On paper, it was a resounding rebuttal to successive short-seller critiques questioning the durability of its AI-driven growth model.

Yet the market reaction was unforgiving. Shares fell in pre-market trading as investors focused on decelerating growth guidance and broader concerns about AI-driven disruption. Even as AppLovin laid out its e-commerce advertising ambitions — positioning itself to extend beyond mobile gaming into performance commerce — the gravitational pull of macro AI skepticism proved stronger than the headline beat. In effect, the company’s scale and visibility made it a proxy for sector-wide sentiment.

A similar dynamic exerted gravitational pull on Criteo’s stock price after it reported its Q4 earnings, with the company closing 2025 touting momentum in its “agentic commerce” strategy, its AI-driven performance engine, and its retail media footprint.

Q4 results underscored solid execution and progress in embedding agentic capabilities across its stack, including a new Agentic Commerce Recommendation Service that it claims delivered a 60% uplift in the prioritization of purchase-likely products in offline testing. It also advanced pilots with large language model partners and conversational shopping formats.

Nonetheless, Criteo’s stock faced comparable headwinds, with retail media pressures overshadowing its forward-looking narrative.

W Media Research analyst Karsten Weide noted that while Criteo’s agentic vision is strategically coherent, investor patience is finite when near-term growth shows signs of strain. In other words, the market is demanding proof that AI-enabled commerce initiatives can deliver sustained margin expansion — not just conceptual leadership.

Taken together, the throughline from Liftoff’s shelved IPO to the mixed receptions for AppLovin and Criteo is clear: public market investors are recalibrating how they price AI in ad tech, with revenue beats and bold strategic roadmaps no longer sufficient insulation against volatility.

However, as LiveRamp’s fortunes over the period demonstrated, there are anomalies: MNTN’s surge in its stock price came after it posted revenue of $87.1 million in Q4, resulting in a $34.5 million net profit for the period. Its ticker surged by more than a third after this.

And the rest…

Meanwhile, the other big names in the sector still have to issue their report cards (see list below for a list of the companies, along with the date of their scheduled earnings), with demand- and sell-side platforms such as The Trade Desk, Viant, PubMatic, and Magnite likely to face questions about their agentic strategies.

Company

• Perion Network February 18
• Zeta Global February 24
• The Trade Desk February 25
• Magnite February 25
• Taboola February 25
• DoubleVerify February 26
• PubMatic February 26

TBD

• Nexxen
• Teads

What we’ve heard

“Most ad tech companies live pay check to pay check [sic], if not in 90 day [sic] cycles. It’s going be fascinating to see how many stay focused on the mission and how many capitulate chasing an agentic world that won’t mean anything scalable for another 3-5 years.”

– Nova Studio’s Matt Barash calls out the hype of agentic.

Numbers to know

• $1.66 billion: AppLovin’s Q4 revenue, up 66% year-on-year.
• $541 million: Criteo’s Q4 revenue, down 2% year-on-year.
• $212 million: LiveRamp’s Q4 revenue, up 8.6% year-on-year.

What we’ve covered

Overheard at the Digiday AI Marketing Strategies event
Marketers, brands, and tech companies gathered at Digiday Media’s AI Marketing Strategies in New York City on Wednesday to discuss AI usage and ethics.

The case for and against bringing programmatic in-house
Industry observers expect to see a high number of media accounts come under review this year. While they peruse pitch decks and RFI responses, CMOs and CFOs may be keeping the arguments for and against working with an agency at all in the backs of their minds.

What we’re reading

Dentsu is replacing its CEO

Dentsu Group is shaking up its top leadership, announcing that Hiroshi Igarashi, its president and global CEO, is set to resign next month and will be succeeded by longtime company executive Takeshi Sano.

Anthropic raises $30 billion

The series G round values the company at $380 billion in a post-money valuation.

WebMCP, the protocol that changed the internet

But we’re still early days and there’s still a lot of innovation and development to come. This week, we even saw Google talk about WebMCP, a browser mechanism to access the MCP on a site. Meaning the chat assistant, accesses that on behalf of the user instead of parsing all the HTMl. Smart.

But how many people have MCPs? Today, virtually no one, mainly developer tools. But expect that to change.