Haynes Column: Creative Realities Joins the $100M Club – The Expensive Way

October 28, 2025 by Dave Haynes

For more than a decade in this industry, the evergreen prediction that’s the equivalent of a tap-in putt has been how there will be more and more consolidation.

But for a lot of those years, there really wasn’t all that much, aside from little deals here and there involving PE-backed software companies growing their customer base through acquisitions.

In the last few years, though, we’ve seen a bunch of activity, to a point that one observer asked the other day, “Who’s left?”

As in who is left to be acquired?

That came up after news was posted that the American software and solutions firm Creative Realities, Inc. had gone to bankers and borrowed $48.5 million USD to buy the Canadian firm Cineplex Digital Media (or CDM for short). Most of the larger deals lately have come from private equity circles, but in this case, CRI took on the deal and debt directly.

It was just announced two weeks ago, but the deal was actually about five years in the making. CRI says it “participated in a process” to acquire CDM back in 2021, but Cineplex, CRI says, “withdrew from market.”

They kept talking, though – as a guy named George Sautter was the bridge between the companies. He is CRI’s Chief Strategy Officer, but his previous gigs were SVP and EVP roles at Cineplex, Canada’s dominant cinema chain. Sautter started as a consultant but eventually joined CRI full-time. The discussions ramped up at the start of this year with NDAs signed, and by May, there was a letter of intent.

A LOT of the deals done to date in digital signage have been about roll-ups – buying and merging several smaller companies to make one larger one. This deal appears to be more about scale and getting much more than a toe-hold in the Canadian market, which is in some respects similar to the US market, but in other ways, very different.

The first thing CRI gets with this deal is scale. Annual revenue pretty much doubles overnight to more than $100 million USD, making CRI a much bigger player and one of a very small handful of companies in the sector (setting the display companies aside), that are doing north of $100M revenue.

They get A&W, some of Tim Horton’s business (I don’t think they do the software anymore for the coffee chain, but still do content creation and management), real banking clients like RBC and Scotiabank, and in a slightly out-of-left field twist, the North Carolina Education Lottery.

CEO Rick Mills on an investor call after the deal announcement said: … “As everybody on this call knows, we’ve talked about scale for a long time. This is a big — go big or go home business, and this doubles the size of our company from $50 million to $100 million in revenue, creates one of the largest North American digital media companies focused on the segments we are focused, which is QSR, retail along with retail media networks, convenience stores, and stadium segments. Another interesting characteristics, both companies focus on large enterprise accounts. We are not built for mom-and-pop signage users. We are built for enterprise accounts. The scope it expands our total addressable market with the addition and focus on the lottery vertical, but it also takes us into the media revenue generation business with media sales.”

What Cineplex gets is cash, to “strengthen its balance sheet and unlock significant value from a non-core asset.” As is the case with the cinema business in general, people aren’t going to the movies in Canada the way previous generations did.

Cineplex got into this now-exiting line of business way back in 2010 when it acquired the small-ish Canadian digital signage solutions firm DDC, and followed that up three years later by acquiring another Canadian company, the software firm eK3, getting some QSR and a big 5 Canadian bank in the process. Most of those accounts are still in place, and one of the interesting things about how CDM rolled was the degree of managed services.

I know from direct experience one of CDM’s whale accounts didn’t even touch the CMS, leaving the work to get stuff on screens and keep it running entirely up to the service provider. The fabulous thing about that is when a service provider is so deeply ingrained in the day-to-day of a client, it is very hard for that client to back out of a deal and find a new service provider. You have to really screw up to get punted under those arrangements.

CRI also gets from the deal about $8M in recurring SaaS software revenue, as well as some piece of the revenue pie from a DOOH network in 95 shopping malls across Canada – most of the big shopping centres. The media wing of Cineplex will continue to sell that.

I am no business analyst, but even a doofus like me can look at a loan that’s almost $50M USD, 60% that needs to be converted in three years, and feel a little jumpy. One contact who looked at CDM suggested privately that CRI paid far too much. Dunno. I know what EBITDA is, but not a bunch else. As is always the case with these things, we’ll see.

What’s certain is that the list of companies on the playing field got a little smaller again, and that will just continue to happen. Most technology verticals have a handful of major players, and then some smaller, highly specialized ones. I think that’s where digital signage is finally going, and CRI has acquired its way into a seat at the big boy table with Stratacache, Poppulo, Navori, Spectrio and a few others, like maybe Uniguest and Appspace. Almost all of those ones grew via M&A as well.