T-Mobile has held talks to buy Vistar Media

T-Mobile and Vistar Media declined to respond to Digiday’s requests for comment, but later confirmed the deal.

Boutique investment bank Allen & Company is understood to be representing the U.S.-based telco. In contrast, LUMA Partners was rumored to be negotiating on behalf of the out-of-home media specialist, although representatives there denied involvement when asked for comment by Digiday. Representatives of Allen & Co. did not respond to Digiday’s attempt to contact them on LinkedIn. 

However, one executive with deep connections in the OOH industry said they had heard the deal is progressing and confirmed T-Mobile as the likely acquirer.

In its recently published analysis of dealmaking in 2024, LUMA Partners, which specializes in the ad tech sector, noted an uptick in such activity. “Last year was characterized by a return of strategic dialogue in the M&A markets,” read its 2024 Full Year Market Report, published Jan. 7. “2024 M&A activity was up +13% from a muted 2023, as Ad Tech (+73%), MarTech (+2%), and Digital Content (+7%) all increased from the prior year.”   

Founded in 2011, Vistar Media has positioned itself as a location-based media specialist. It claims to offer a complete marketplace to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers in the OOH ad tech space, including an ad server and demand- and supply-side platforms.

Sources could not provide Digiday with estimates of valuations those engaged in such negotiations may discuss, but the OOH company claims its business is “surging.” According to the company, its campaign billings were up by 77% year-on-year, spurred by a 31% increase in new advertisers during the same period in an August 2024 press release — a prospectus that’s typical of most sales processes.   

“I think you’ll see them make a number of transactions here [from T-Mobile] because they’re the last man standing as it relates to a telco that still believes in the ad opportunity,” said one source speaking upon condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of such M&A negotiations.

Per its official figures from late 2024, T-Mobile has more than 127.5 million connections, which it intends to use as the catalyst for its ambitions in the media business, with the completion of any such deal likely to place it in a prime position in the U.S. digital OOH sector, which as a total addressable market of $9 billion, per eMarketer estimates.  

In separate announcements last year, T-Mobile launched an in-store retail media network featuring more than 20,000 screens across T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile retail locations, and later enhanced with a tie-up with Uber’s own advertising division. This was a significant development for its nascent advertising ambitions and was enabled via its 2022 purchase of Octopus Interactive, a ride share advertising network — financial terms of the acquisition were not publicly disclosed — to further shore up its footprint in the advertising business.

Before the 2020 approval of its merger with (then) fellow telco Sprint, T-Mobile purchased PushSpring for an undisclosed fee, a transaction that helped it provide app developers and publishers with audience data to enhance ad targeting and in-app push notifications, a development that also saw it start to sell media mobile inventory through its T-Life mobile app — representing an audience base of more than 7 million customers.

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Such offerings fall under the telco’s T-Mobile Advertising Solutions division of the telco, a company whose market capitalization stood at approximately $250 billion as of January 2025, which counts former WarnerMedia ad sales boss Jean-Paul Colaco and veteran ad tech leader Mike Peralta among its number. T-Mobile’s continued efforts demonstrate its continued faith in sustaining a noteworthy ads business and contrast with telco rivals such as AT&T and Verizon, which have vacated similar plans in recent years, primarily over privacy concerns. 

Parallel to the significant strides in developing its advertising services in recent years, T-Mobile encountered substantial privacy challenges, including multiple data breaches, leading to regulatory scrutiny and substantial financial settlements.

After altering its data policies to enroll customers into its ads-targeting business in 2021 automatically, the carrier has experienced several high-profile privacy lawsuits that have somewhat stymied the acceleration of its ads business, including record fines. For example, the telco agreed to a $350 million settlement after a hack that compromised the data of its customers — a case that arose again in January 2025 — and in 2024, it agreed to pay $60 million in connection to unauthorized data access incidents following a ruling from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.