MERGE und DRANG

Media M&A In 2025

Happy Monday War & Peaceniks. Ready to Merge?

Twenty years ago, according to a study by Bain & Co., just 30% of major mergers and acquisitions succeeded, with AOL and Time Warner serving as the case study for M&E M&A crash & burns. However, in the last two decades, there’ve been 660,000 major M&As, worth $56 trillion. And, those big brains at Bain have discovered that, nowadays, 70% of these deals succeed.

The main reasons for this reversal in success rate:

1. Whereas M&A used to be utilized to buy competitors doing the same thing, more often today, deals get done to diversify business models and compliment core competencies.

2. Diligence, in large part in reaction to the M&A failure rate, is just better now than it used to be.

3. The more dealmakers make deals, the better they get at it. Think of M&A experts as a large language model, getting smarter with every transaction.

4. The main reason for failure used to be culture clashes. Since, acquiring -Suites came to understand that they could not just swallow each other up without accounting for organizational, human, and cultural factors.

With this deal-making turnaround and the probable regulatory relaxation coming from America’s new/old administration, most experts in and outside of Media agree with my prediction that 2025 will be a major year for M&A.

In fact, the only announcement of any real meaning to come out of CES was not at CES. Prior to day one in Vegas, Disney announced that they had settled their pending lawsuit with Fubo… by acquiring Fubo (or at least controlling interest). This set off a serial parlor game of “WTF does this mean, and who’s merging next?”

Before we look at who’s on deck for M&A, let’s look at the three M&As that kicked off Corporate Cuffing Season…