ExchangeWire rounds up some of the goings on in the world of ad tech during the last seven days, and in this week’s edition: Ad Tech not dead yet as Exelate exits For $200 million; Zalando buys Metrigo for $3 million as it looks to in-house its buying function; and Rubicon releases third annual mobile buyer survey.

Nielsen Acquires Exelate for $200 million; Ad Tech not dead yet, clearly

With an unprecedented number of stories over the past two weeks about the imminent death of advertising technology, big M&A deals continue to spite the nay sayers.

This week, Nielsen acquired data exchange, Exelate, for a reputed $200 million. ExchangeWire read a bunch of suggestions as to why Nielsen might have taken on board what is essentially a cookie exchange, the most plausible comes from AdAge's Alex Kantrowitz, who suggests that Nielsen took the plunge into ad tech to protect its position in TV.

With programmatic encroaching on the antiquated reach and frequency metrics of TV, there was a chance that Nielsen might not be able to compete if TV buying went fully programmatic, which it probably will at some stage.

Was it worth $200 million? Let's just see. However, again, ad tech is proving to be an important piece of the monetisation puzzle for legacy data and media companies. As argued in the Echo Chamber this week, investors and the industry at large clearly have no idea about the value of advertising technology for the digital media as a whole.

To use a techie analogy here, ad tech is a bit like XML - effectively useless on its own but combined with media the middleware that powers ad monetisation. In that context, ad tech clearly needs media and media needs ad tech.

There will be more deals as outlier buyers realise they need this tech to remain competitive in a shifting digital media landscape.

Zalando buys bidder - Looking to in-house programmatic?

It's no secret that Zalando spends a lot of money on DR, employing the services of numerous vendors to deliver on their metrics. Rumours abound that it has been actively seeking a strategy to lessen its dependence on third-party buyers - with the ultimate goal of in-housing some of this programmatic functionality.

It now looks like they are actively seeking to execute this strategy with its purchase of German-based bidder, Metrigo. Metrigo, which was bought by Zanox in 2013, has now been sold to Zalando for reportedly €3 million. The original team is expected to stay on.

It's hard to see what Zalando will do from here. Running and maintaining a bidder is expensive and given it's not core to their business, you'd have to question how it can keep keep pace with innovation from pure play ad tech operations.

It might not be their last purchase, as it still is missing some critical pieces of the stack, like a DMP. Will Zalando make another German bargain-basement purchase, trying to cobble together a Zalando ad stack? Very likely.

Rubicon releases third annual mobile buyer survey

The big story in mobile advertising continues to be its phenomenal growth and the flow of spend into the channel. On the back of MWC this week, Rubicon released its third annual mobile buyer survey.

For those of you too busy to read it in full, ExchangeWire has summarised the best bits below:

- Spend on native mobile advertising is set to more than double in 2015 globally, taking a 13% share of overall global mobile spend in 2015
- The buying of automated guaranteed mobile advertising is also set to grow globally in 2015
- Standard formats are still the most in-demand type of mobile advertising from buyers around the world, accounting for 46% of spend

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in 2015, as both and publishers and marketers look to push into both native and video.