It’s not your imagination: merger and acquisition activity did rise sharply towards the end of last year.  Investment bank LUMA reports that fourth quarter media and martech deals were up 21% compared to the year before, (97 vs 80) even though deals were down by 45% for the first three quarters (149 vs 270).   Martech deals dropped 60% in the first three quarters but bounced back for a 6% year-on-year gain in the fourth quarter.

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)