Notes From a 20-Year CEO, One Year Post-Acquisition by Publicis

A year ago, this week four of us from Lotame met with Groupe to start a rapid deep dive into our compatibility as businesses. Honestly those three months leading up to the announcement of Lotame’s acquisition are a blur. The small team under the tent was acting with two mindsets: business as usual, and the exact opposite. It was frenetic, exciting, stressful, energizing, and exhausting.  I will never ever forget the experience of that part of the journey.

Come March 2025, one of the best kept secrets in adtech was out of the bag, in a big way.

I was noticeably absent from the public forum post announcement — and for none of the typical reasons the rumor mill may imagine or presume. I’ve been heads down on the Lotame business, per usual.

It’s been an extraordinary year. Any fears I may have had about finding our place or fitting in dissolved. The combined leadership at Groupe and Epsilon is light years ahead in strategy, agility, and a client-first mentality. To see these extraordinary thinkers across disciplines light up as we dug into our product suite was validation for the often thankless work in the trenches. I’ve seen the fruits of our collaboration firsthand in driving enrichment and analytics, scaling connected media and identity, and winning new business.

So why did Groupe acquire us? You’ve read the release, and all of that is true. Here’s my POV, a year in.  (From a slightly different perspective.)

We were acquired for the following 3 reasons and importantly, they are the same 3 reasons why we exist as an independent business today.

1. We fight like hell for our clients and they stick with us.
2. Our experience is hard-earned and unmatched.
3. We lean into that experience and ignore the noise.

Let me clarify.

1. Fight

I mean “fight” in the best sense of the word. We’ve got a fire in us as a company. We have to because we’re an intentionally lean team that has been consistently underestimated. We are both thinkers AND doers because there’s no time to parse responsibilities or throw around titles. Average tenure of senior management at Lotame and above is 10+ years; across the company it’s 8 years. That institutional knowledge is priceless for clients and partners.

What we all share is that burn in the belly and persistence to make our clients smarter, faster and their outcomes easier to realize. Our “fight” for them is egoless in an industry fueled by ego. They’ve worked in lockstep with us over the many years to create data solutions that work in real-world use cases, not theory or abstraction. Our longstanding, loyal clients know who they are and why they’ve stuck with us.

2. Experience

The market is (over)stuffed. Adtech, Martech, and now niche AI companies promise to solve marketer problems and deliver outsized returns. A handful of those companies are worth their salt. The majority lack the advantage of compound experience like Lotame. You can’t gain this overnight. You have to earn it through success and failure and constant iteration and entrepreneurial spirit to go where others won’t or can’t.

Lotame earned our experience through all the twists and turns and pivots and endless moods of our industry. We have a long view on the market unlike the vast majority in our space, one that only time in the market teaches you.

For example, we introduced the idea of a “connected future” six years ago with the launch of our identity solution. We were talking about the urgency of data connectivity in cookieless environments with our clients and partners and made good on that urgency by prioritizing collaboration with friends and frenemies. When it wasn’t popular or trendy or even on most marketers’ radar. You didn’t read about it in the press but IYKYK how important that work was to meet the moment we’re in today.

3. Noise-less

How many times did we hear our category was “dead”? From reporters, well-funded myth makers, the new “shiny penny” company on the block. They tried to stifle our business at every turn. They badmouthed us behind our backs but asked us for help in the next breath… research companies conveniently left us out of category reviews.

And we trudged onward.

Remaining positive, and full of good energy.

We ignored the noise, kept our heads down, and focused on the outcomes we promised our clients. We’ve (over time) saved those clients countless cycles, money, energy on doing what we do best — the unsexy work of connecting the ecosystem — what many thought leaders love to wax on about — we’ve done it already. Marketers always needed “the plumbing” to make their ambitions a reality. We laid the foundation and kept building on top of it at scale, everywhere. We cared less about what anyone called us, and more about what was moving the needle for clients. We focused less on the bravado, and more on delivering a world-class set of products, driving connectivity.

The things I am most proud of today are all of the above and the fact that we have proven within a year we deserve to be an independent business, inside of a company with over 100,000 employees. We’ve never been a company that swaggers but now after the experience of the past year and integrating into a huge company, (all while continually delivering for our clients) we’ve earned it. 2026 is going to be a VOLUME UP year for Lotame. Stay tuned as we execute and deliver yet again across the board.

I’ve learned so much about “so much” during the past year. How to balance the needs of a new owner, versus continuing to support and strategize with our direct clients… I could write a book on this subject, and it would be a cool roadmap for entrepreneurs and CEOs post-acquisition.

The term “Built to Last” from the Grateful Dead comes to mind continually in my mind, as I look “Backwards Down the Number Line” of our 20-year livelihood.

“Once in a while you can get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

That is us in a nutshell.