Report: AOL/Verizon looking to acquire Millennial Media

Baltimore’s adtech landscape could continue to shift, drastically.
TechCrunch reports that AOL is looking to acquire Millennial Media.
The national tech outlet quotes “sources” that say the deal could be worth between $300 and $350 million.
Canton-based Millennial Media, which was founded in 2006 by Chris Brandenburg and Paul Palmieri is a publicly-traded company specializing in mobile advertising. The company went public in 2012 and entered the market with a $2 billion valuation, but has struggled to maintain those figures.
From the TechCrunch report:

On the back of earnings that have fallen short of expectations and perhaps some skepticism about the company’s longer term prospects as an independent in the face of competition from the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook, Millennial has lost nearly 90 percent of its valuation since going public.
“Millennial has a bunch of good assets and some legacy bad assets,” is how one observer described the company. “They’ve been prepped for sale for some time.”

Verizon just bought AOL in a major deal that was said to be centered around digital advertising. Bringing in Millennial Media would add to AOL’s capabilities.
AOL already has a huge advertising presence in Baltimore. That operation, which grew out of Advertising.com and is now known as AOL Platforms, recently moved from the Under Armour campus to a big space in the Natty Boh Tower — right down the street from Millennial Media’s Can Company space.
Millennial Media made a couple of acquisitions itself over the last year to add programmatic capabilities, bringing on Jumptap in 2013 and Nexage at the end of last year. Following the Nexage deal, Millennial Media made the Boston-based startup’s former CEO, Ernie Cormier, its COO.