The 2010s were all about blockbuster bets and tectonic shifts. Here's a look back at the decade's most game-changing deals in advertising, media, and marketing.

• Mike Shields, the former advertising editor for Business Insider who is now CEO of Shields Strategic Consulting, lists the most game-changing advertising/media/marketing tech deals of the past decade.
• These include Disney acquiring Maker Studios for almost $1 billion in 2014; AOL acquiring The Huffington Post in 2011; and News Corp. acquiring Time Warner, among others.
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Wow, there sure have been a lot of deals in the media industry. Just the other day, Rubicon and Telaria announced a merger. That was just weeks after Mastercard purchased SessionM and Disney bought some Fox assets.

But those are just mere transactions, footnotes in the digital evolution. Now, it's time to look back on the most game-changing advertising/media/marketing tech deals of the past decade. For the 2010s were about blockbuster bets and tectonic shifts:

1. 2014: Verizon acquires OnCue and soon sets off the streaming era with the launch of Go90. For a time, it would be hard to imagine streaming live NBA games and teen dramas with your crew on your phone - sideways - but now it's all we do. Think about it - there wouldn't be a Quibi without a Go90.
2. 2013: Publicis acquires Omnicom - the 2010s were about building a powerhouse marketing services team that had everything you'd ever want in one place. Mission accomplished. Or should I say, Mission Accompli! (This deal happened, right? At the time, it seemed very complicated, but who remembers.)
3. 2014: Disney acquires Maker Studios for almost $1 billion. A lot of people point to Bob Iger's deals for Marvel or Star Wars as major game changers. But it was this stealth acquisition that set the Mouse House on a course to dominate the lucrative MCN market and connected the company with family-friendly talent such as PewDiePie.
4. 2013: Yahoo acquires Tumblr for $1 billion. Many people pointed to then-CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to give users unlimited storage in Flickr as her most savvy move, but to me it was thrusting Yahoo into the social media stratosphere with Tumblr. Right now, it's hard to imagine a Baby Yoda meme not being Tumblr-ed to you, along with relevant targeted ads, but there was a time when this wasn't possible.
5. 2015 and 2017: Verizon acquires AOL and Yahoo to form Oath. It's been said that in digital marketing, data is the new oil. And while it's true that Verizon wasn't able to actually use its wireless data to target ads in the end, it was able to pivot Oath to a house of brands.
6. 2016: News Corp acquires Unruly Media for $176 million. If you've ever visited a local newspaper site, you recognize the elegance of out stream native video. Unruly brought the Murdoch family this in spades - so much so that they hired a bank earlier this year to see if they could flip it.
7. 2011: AOL acquires The Huffington Post for $315 million. The publisher, after inventing live news streaming, has proven to be a perfect fit inside new parent Verizon. Meanwhile, this deal set off a decade of perfectly reasonable digital media valuations.
8. 2018: Adobe acquires Marketo for $4.75 billion. At one point, both companies had offered marketers a dashboard where they could look at all their important numbers. Suddenly, brands had an even bigger dashboard with more columns.
9. 2013: ABC and Univision launch Fusion - was it a cable network for millennials? A website not aimed at Latinos? We may never know.
10. 2019: Chicken Soup for the Soul acquires Crackle. Netflix's US growth is slowing. Coincidence?
11. 2014: AT&T acquires DirecTV for $48.5 billion. As Dave Matthews once put it, "Satellite dish in my yard, tell me more, tell me more."
12. 2011: Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo team up to sell "class 2" inventory, kicking off a era of premium digital ad consortiums, including Brand.net, Pangea, Quadrant One, and too many others to list.
13. 2019: Vice Media acquires Refinery29. Not only were the cultures a perfect fit, but Refinery29's 29 Rooms art initiative appears to the perfect programming anchor for the Viceland cable network.
14. 2014: News Corp acquires Time Warner - Murdoch finally gets his cable empire, keeping the power center of this industry inside of traditional media.
15. 2017: NBCUniversal spends $230 million on a property called Craftsy. Seriously, this really happened.