Marketbridge Buys Channel99, Adding B2B Ad Tech to Its Agency Stack

Marketbridge, a 35-year-old B2B marketing firm, announced Tuesday it has acquired Channel99, a B2B advertising and attribution technology company founded in 2022 by Chris Golec, the former founder and CEO of Demandbase. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition gives Marketbridge its first true technology business. Until now, the company has bought agencies and consultancies — an influencer agency, a media agency, a PR and comms agency and an analytics consultancy — to fill specific needs and reach specific markets.

What does Channel99 actually do?

Channel99 is not a demand-side platform in the open web programmatic sense. It spans platforms instead: Microsoft/LinkedIn, what Golec's peers would call the Googleverse, Meta and other hubs of business media and influence.

Marketbridge CEO Bob Ray said Channel99 fills an important gap in his company's services stack as an agentic search analytics provider. Its software answers questions such as: "How does one company's services rank in LLM chatbot responses compared to competitors?" and "How do paid media and marketing tactics in other channels affect performance in agentic or generative search platforms?"

The next step, Ray said, is building an attribution framework that shows how agentic performance contributes to sales or conversions — measured much like a media buyer would measure any other channel.

How the deal came together

The two CEOs are old acquaintances. Ray and Golec overlapped at media and marketing agency DWA, which Dentsu acquired in 2017 as Merkle's B2B arm. They also live in the same Bay Area community in Marin.

"This is a people-based business," Ray said. As the two recently discussed their respective companies, they reached the same conclusion: independent technology companies are struggling right now for "relevance" with the large platforms and big clients.

Golec needed scale. "I was moaning and groaning," he said, "about, 'God, how I need to get scale with the sales and marketing organization and go raise a bunch of money.'" Selling to Marketbridge removed the fundraising path from the table.

What persuaded him, Golec said, was Ray's "passion around becoming a technology-enabled service company." The two had already pitched enterprise companies together and partnered on events. "In a way," Golec said, "this alignment gives us both speed in the marketplace."

A different model from the holding companies

Marketbridge runs its acquisitions centrally. Ray described them as centralized and nonduplicative, in contrast to the traditional holding company model, which acquires agencies but generally lets them operate independently.

"I would think of it as a 'next-gen integrated agency consulting company,'" Ray said.

Not every moment of the announcement carried full alignment. As Ray discussed indie tech companies' "barriers to growth" and said the two CEOs had "come to the same conclusion" that Channel99 needed to be part of a larger services group, Golec's face showed more of a grimace than any sign of agreement, according to AdExchanger's account of the conversation.

For B2B marketers, the practical question is what changes: Marketbridge can now measure brand performance inside LLM chatbot responses and connect agentic search activity to conversions, capabilities that most agency stacks still lack.