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Monday, June 29, 2009
Back in 2007, we briefly reviewed the major M&A activity in the digital ad serving technology and digital agency spaces. Many of our panel observers felt that Google and Microsoft should immediately divest themselves of the agency parts of the DoubleClick/Performics and Aquantive/Razorfish acquisitions, to clear out some of the conflict of interest inherent in major agencies owned by the sellers of supposedly performance-based, impartial media platforms.
Google moved relatively quickly to divest itself of Performics, whereas Microsoft held onto the Razorfish business -- until now.
Amazingly, the $6 billion acquisition of Aquantive counted as Microsoft's biggest ever acquisition. Considering its size and clout, Razorfish (formerly Avenue A | Razorfish) has had a relatively quiet two years since then. Perhaps this can be chalked up to this mega-agency's DNA; its first go-round in Bubble 1.0 was in the fast-hiring, website-overbuilding, overvaluation heyday of 1995-2000. And the company still seems to favor slow-loading, expensive-to-build, semi-indexable pages. Like ALPO, a recent client win for Razorfish, could it be that Razorfish represents a previous era of overpackaged, overstrategized goods with the same old ALPO inside the can?
While some may ask why Microsoft is selling this business, Daily Finance reporter Douglas McIntyre proffers: "What it is doing with the company in the first place is anybody's guess."
Certainly, if the long delay in selling Razorfish was helpful in demonstrating that Microsoft's decision-making process was totally independent of industry opinion that they should divest sooner, the delay was effective. Unfortunately, the value of the asset may now be sharply reduced. But so are many assets... such as the parts of Yahoo Microsoft is still considering strategically partnering with or buying.Labels: msft, razorfish
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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