After several years of rampant M&A in the B2B media space, which included the $5 billion sale of UBM to Informa, the estimated $180 million sale of Questex to MidOcean and the acquisition and merger of Hanley Wood into Meyers Group (also under MidOcean), M&A has slowed considerably in 2019--and not just in B2B. The $29 billion merger of Refinitiv and London Stock Exchange notwithstanding, the number of deals across data and information services, consumer media, events and even software and technology have plummeted.

Robert Biolchini, the longtime CEO of PennWell, passed away this week. Biolchini retired as CEO of PennWell in 2015 to become Chairman of the Board, and also served on the board of directors for both American Business Media and Connectiv.

The proposed IAB standards are open for public comment until Nov. 28. In that spirit, we asked some digital media executives within the Connectiv community for their thoughts on the new proposals. The collective response seems to be that the new guidelines are welcome and not difficult for publishers to accommodate on the technical side. However, getting both B2B ad sellers and B2B ad buyers to actually embrace these new types of ad formats is a far bigger challenge.