When Wall Street started reading ad tech dashboards

Kevin Simonson was freelancing for direct-to-consumer (DTC) menswear brand Mack Weldon in 2011 when he made a startling realization: The same consumer data he used to optimize Facebook ad campaigns could also offer investors a window into the company’s growth potential.

The ad performance report Simonson prepared for Mack Weldon made its way to private equity firm KarpReilly, an investor in the DTC menswear brand. Executives were impressed enough to request a meeting, and soon Simonson was sending quarterly updates about advertising trends. Those reports offered vital insight into customer acquisition costs, demand signals and category momentum.

“I was young and naive and not in the finance world at all,” Simonson told The Current. “I didn’t realize how much value I was providing.”

From media reporting to market intelligence

What began as campaign optimization has quietly become market intelligence. Increasingly, private equity firms are using ad tech data not only to sell products, but to evaluate companies and price growth — often before those signals surface in financial statements. For marketers, it’s a reminder that the dashboards used to optimize media may also be the earliest indicators of where demand is headed.

Nihal Mehta, partner at Eniac Ventures, a venture capital firm whose portfolio includes several ad tech companies, said the shift reflects a broader structural change. “As more and more of this kind of data is becoming accessible and AI can be used to distill it quickly, investment decisions are being augmented in a big way,” he said.

Fifteen years later, Simonson — now CEO of e-commerce agency adMixt — consults several private equity firms, and his analyses rely almost entirely on consumer and performance data sourced from ad tech vendors. “I never even ask for a [profit and loss] statement when evaluating a company, because I didn’t need it,” Simonson said. 

Instead, he examines a company’s ad platform data across search, social and the broader open internet, layering in third-party measurement tools such as Northbeam and Triple Whale — which aggregate cross-channel performance data — and compares it with the brand’s sales data, often from Shopify. The result is a detailed picture of who a brand’s customers are, how efficiently they can be acquired and how much growth is realistically available with the right media strategy.

Due diligence, reimagined

Some firms, including L Catterton and Provenance, have formalized similar approaches. For Anthony Choe, founder of Provenance, ad tech data doesn’t just supplement traditional due diligence — in some cases, it reshapes it.

“Most investors are doing it the old-fashioned way — spreadsheets, surveys, hiring consultants to tell them market mapping. It’s outside-in work,” Choe told The Current. “We like to think we look at businesses from the inside to see what makes their customers tick.”

To do that, Choe overlays third-party demographic and psychographic data — originally developed for advertising — with a company’s first-party data. The methodology mirrors how sophisticated marketers evaluate omnichannel campaign performance, but the goal is different: identifying untapped demand, inefficiencies in customer acquisition and potential expansion opportunities.

For marketers, that raises a provocative question: If investors are using these datasets to price growth, are brands fully leveraging them to shape strategy?

The open internet advantage

Third-party data co-ops were originally built to power the ad tech ecosystem, enabling marketers to plan, execute, optimize and measure across search, social and commerce. But as the industry matured — particularly after the digital advertising stack coalesced into closed-loop measurement systems in the early 2010s — the underlying datasets developed “broad applicability beyond just serving ads to people,” Choe said.

What makes this data especially valuable is its breadth across the open internet, offering a composite view of consumer behavior rather than a platform-specific snapshot. For investors trying to understand category trends or gauge customer acquisition efficiency, that wider lens can reveal patterns that don’t always surface in financial filings. Because advertising performance data updates in near real time, it can also provide an early read on rising or softening demand across an entire category — sometimes weeks or months before those shifts appear in retail sales data or quarterly earnings reports.

Those applications now include investment due diligence and even real estate site selection for brick-and-mortar businesses.

Signal after iOS 14

The advertising industry’s signal environment shifted again in 2021, when Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework made cross-site tracking more difficult. But while deterministic tracking weakened, broader consumer datasets did not disappear.

“Those underlying datasets don’t help Facebook as much because of iOS 14,” Choe said. “But the underlying principles behind the datasets are still available.”

In other words, performance marketing may have grown more complex — but consumer insight remains intact for those who know how to model it across channels.

According to Blake Saunders, a partner at the boutique investment bank Core Advisors, the financial value of ad performance data lies in its precision around customer acquisition costs. “When you use this ad tech data, you can better know if you’re able to grow the company efficiently,” he said.

For Simonson, consulting for private equity firms has also proven an effective way to land new agency business. When he co-founded digital agency Metric Digital in 2015, his performance reports were structured so that CEOs could show investors their money was being well spent. That visibility led to requests from private equity executives seeking similar analyses for other companies in their portfolios — and ultimately for prospective investments.

Over time, what began as media reporting became advisory work. The feedback loop continues. AdMixt was recently approached by a skin care brand, referred by one of its private equity investors, after another portfolio company saw measurable gains.

The greatest investment opportunity for private equity firms and their portfolio companies lies in the open internet, said Andrew Lipsman, founder of the consultancy Media, Ads + Commerce. “I’m not a PE firm, but if I were, I’d probably have a thesis about diversifying spend into channels beyond Meta and Google, particularly performance TV and other emerging arbitrage opportunities,” he said.

What it means for marketers

If private equity firms are treating ad tech data as a predictive layer for broader market performance, it signals just how valuable and influential consumer data has become.

For marketers and media buyers, that shift carries implications. The dashboards built for media optimization are increasingly influencing how growth is evaluated and how risk is priced. What began as campaign reporting now sits closer to strategic decision-making.

As AI reshapes media, commerce and consumer behavior, the competitive advantage will belong not just to those who can buy efficiently, but to those who interpret consumer signals first — and then apply them beyond media.