• by Wayne Friedman , September 30, 2014

Media and marketing deal-making nearly tripled its dollar volume in the third quarter of this same period a year ago.  
      
In tracking 657 merger and acquisition deals in media and marketing, investment banker Petsky Prunier says deal volume was at $50.9 billion for the third quarter of this year compared to $17.4 billion in 2013. Third-quarter 2013 deals totaled 600. 
                                 
Digital media/commerce was the most active in deals and volume -- 253 deals and $19.6 billion.

Marketing technology deals were at 198 transactions and $7.9 billion. Traditional media deals were at $5.9 billion in volume, while agency/marketing services was at $5.6 billion.

The digital advertising segment was up 12% with 56 deals. Of those deals, digital video was the most active sub-segment with 14 transactions worth $1.2 billion.

The third quarter of 2014 results were lower than the $78.5 billion deal volume and 736 deals in the second quarter of this year and the $95.2 billion deal volume and 756 deals in the first quarter. But taking out two major deals in those respective periods -- Comcast-Time Warner Cable in the first quarter and the AT&T-DirecTV deal in the second -- brings down those results significantly.

In the third quarter of this year, one of the bigger deals was GTECH’s $6.5 billion acquisition of gaming company International Game Technology. Microsoft’s $2.5 billion purchase of Sweden-based gaming company Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, also occurred during the three-month period.
                                
Also during the third quarter, online real estate company Zillow announced a $3.3 billion purchase of Trulia, a provider of tools to research homes, at a valuation of 19.1 times revenue.

Gannett bought the remaining 73% stake in Cars.com for $1.8 billion. During the period, Amazon made a $970 million acquisition of Twitch, which operates a live streaming site for video games.