Canadian ad tech business StackAdapt has been on a growth mission in 2025, using the $235 million in funding it announced back in February to expand its team and gain market share for its demand-side platform both in North America and abroad. Part of that mission has involved making a concentrated effort to push to win more business from the major holding companies which, for all the challenges they currently face, handle a large portion of the global media market.
But going after the holdcos isn’t easy. It can be hard enough convincing any agency to embed a new tool in their teams’ workflows, given the training and technical legwork required — a problem which only gets harder, the larger an agency is. With the holding companies however, there’s not just one top-down decision maker who needs to be convinced.
“With an independent agency, there might be just one decision maker who is able to make that decision after a three week evaluation process,” said Chris Keenan, head of agency development EMEA for StackAdapt. “With the holding companies, there are a lot more stakeholders involved, there’s never going to be a global top-down mandate to use a new partner.”
Plus, the big agency groups aren’t generally on the lookout for new DSP partners. “No one needs another omnichannel DSP with proprietary AI, great customer service, and all of that — they probably have seven of those on their roster already,” said Keenan.
It’s the job of him and Kim Marchan, who leads StackAdapt’s efforts to court holdcos in the Americas, to find a way through to the major agency groups despite these challenges. And as the two explained to VideoWeek, the massive transformation projects that the holding groups are going through at the moment are opening up windows of opportunity for the Canadian DSP.
Finding a message that resonates
Positioning is obviously a big part of the picture. As Keenan suggests, the big agencies have heard plenty of pitches from potential ad tech partners, but that doesn’t mean they’re not open to new ideas.
For StackAdapt, one key selling point is its focus on specific client verticals. StackAdapt has teams within the organisation which work on solutions for individual verticals such as B2B, healthcare, auto, and political advertisers. The way StackAdapt handles data as well, bringing it in at the signal level rather than the aggregated segment level, also lands well with prospective partners, since it enables more granular insights and measurements.
“When I speak with agency team members, they usually have a client that is burning in the back of their mind,” said Keenan. “So when we say ‘we’re really strong in B2B, and we have this differentiated approach to data’, that usually resonates strongly with those teams.”
For Marchan, StackAdapt’s performance credentials are a big selling point. “The reason I joined StackAdapt is because I really believe we have differentiated data resources,” she said. “I believe that our performance engine, which is really focused on driving outcomes, is better suited to meet the needs of agency holding company goals than a lot of the competitors out there.”
The fact that StackAdapt has always built new features and functionalities in-house means that it’s able to offer real differentiation from competitors. “Our brand lift studies are built in-house,” said Marchan. “Our footfall measurement is built in-house. And when I share that with agency partners they’re really interested, because a lot of DSPs just pull technology from different places rather than building it themselves.”
With agencies shifting remuneration models towards outcomes, being able to rely on their media partners for predictable performance is vital as they spin up their own guaranteed outcomes offerings.
Flexibility is key
Even with a differentiated offering, finding a way into the holding companies can still be tough. Figuring out where to pitch in the business, and what sort of work to pitch for, is important.
Partly, that’s a case of knowing your strengths, and using those as a way in. Given StackAdapt’s vertical-oriented structure, it won’t typically try to get holding groups to move their global CPG campaigns onto its platform right away.
The advantage of the holding group structure when it comes to pitching is that as collections of separate agency brands, there are many possible points of entry. These individual agency brands won’t all have the same requirements, meaning a company like StackAdapt can pitch different services to different parts of the business.
The company’s expansion into martech earlier this year has helped on this front. “That’s opened up new conversations with the holdcos, as well as independent agencies, where we can work with teams we wouldn’t have worked with historically,” said Keenan.
Across the board, flexibility is key. “I really try to understand the three key objectives of the holding company that I’m working with,” said Marchan. “Is it trying to retain and win clients? Do they want to be innovative and try new things? Do they have a couple of new clients in their portfolio who we can help service? And then I tailor our approach to that. There’s no one size fits all way of working with them.”
“We don’t have the hubris to go into these big groups and say they’ll want to use all of our services,” added Keenan. “We’re incredibly flexible in what we bring to the table. Sometimes we’ll play a leading role, and sometimes it’ll be a supporting role.”
Nowadays, the holding companies are more set up for these sorts of integrations. It’s no longer a case of comparing the full-stack capabilities of two DSPs and choosing which one to use – rather, the holdcos pick and choose which bits they want to use from different providers.
Bringing raw ingredients to the table
Another change on the agency front is that they now typically expect DSPs to integrate into their own tech stacks, rather than integrating themselves into the DSP. Again, this means partners have to be flexible — if an ad tech company tries to pitch its entire stack to a holding company, they’re often essentially pitching themselves against that agency’s own internal platform.
But there are also opportunities within this new structure. The holding companies are always looking for ways to improve and differentiate their own internal platforms, and so are open to co-developing new capabilities alongside their ad tech partners.
Prior to joining StackAdapt, Keenan worked for WPP, and says it was often hard to get the attention of some of their tech partners when it came to requesting new product capabilities. But StackAdapt has a large team of engineers — Keenan says potentially more engineers than the total staff count of some DSPs — meaning it has plenty of resources to work directly with the holding companies to help them create unique capabilities which differentiate them from their competitors.
“My old team would be sick of me asking our partners what they could bring to the table in terms of raw ingredients,” said Keenan. “As an agency, we needed to differentiate ourselves beyond just delivering the lowest TV rate possible. At StackAdapt, we have those raw ingredients which we can bring to the table for the agencies to work with because like Kim said, we built everything from the ground up.”
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