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According to the traditional playbook, these brands, known as DTCs, should struggle to carve out anything more than a niche business with their limited budgets. A decade ago, the notion that there would soon be a tidal wave of DTCs grabbing meaningful marketshare, raising huge amounts of venture capital and even going public—well, it would have sounded not only unlikely, but absurd. Epsilon highlights LUMA CEO Terence Kawaja’s “Fire Your CMO: Marketing’s Future Will Not Resemble Its Past” presentation on how DTCs have taken an approach pioneered by software companies and applied it to more traditional goods and services.Keep Reading

The advertising industry and civil rights organizations have teamed to ratchet up pressure on the social media giant, but the company is holding firm. Click the button to check out Terence Kawaja’s position on the situation in the full article from NBC News.Keep Reading

Terence Kawaja, CEO of LUMA Partners talks about the early days of the CTV streaming competition with Bloomberg’s Lisa Abramowicz and Paul Sweeney.Keep Reading

2019 started slow for ad tech M&A, but merger activity gained steam and the fourth quarter was one of the most active in recent memory. The number of scaled deals worth $100 million or more across Ad Tech, MarTech and digital media grew nearly 20% over 2018 levels. And to what does Ad Tech owe this great bounty? LUMA’s VP Conor McKenna highlights Ad Tech surprising growth in 2019 and what lies ahead for 2020. Click the button below to check out the AdExchange article.Keep Reading

Terence Kawaja, CEO of LUMA Partners talks about growing digital and streaming competition with Bloomberg’s Lisa Abramowicz and Paul Sweeney.Keep Reading

Direct-to-consumer brands were born out of — or so founders say — a desire to do everything, cutting out middlemen like retail partners and establishing direct connections with customers that create a feedback loop of insight-fueled product development. The goal was to build better brands with fewer hands in the pot. But online growth has proven to be far from limitless.Keep Reading

On this week’s episode of The MadTech Podcast, ExchangeWire’s Rachel Smith & Lindsay Rowntree are joined by Ruben Schreurs, CEO, Digital Decisions, to discuss the latest news in ad tech and martech including diving into LUMA’s Q2 2019 Market Report.Keep Reading

Last month, Accenture Interactive snapped up independent creative agency Droga5 in its biggest acquisition to date, following similar moves it has made in recent years to become a stronger competitor to ad agencies. But that acquisition spree is over for now as the company turns its attention to organizing its employees around the world, said Nikki Mendonça, global president of Accenture Interactive Operations at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit.Keep Reading

Q1 2019 in a nutshell: Ad tech isn’t doing as poorly as you’d think (all things considered), TV and data are colliding, DTC is sizzling, private equity is still gung-ho on M&A, and so are the marketing clouds. It’s not a bad report card, despite a general sense of caution and trepidation about macro factors in the economy, said Terry Kawaja, CEO and Founder of investment bank LUMA Partners.Keep Reading

In much of the marketing industry, what is old always becomes new again – usually with a different name or new buzzword. The current direct-to-consumer (DTC) craze is no exception. Just look at the DTC Brand LUMAscape created by LUMA, a US investment bank focused on digital media and marketing.Keep Reading

Beet.TV turns 13 and digital elites including LUMA’s Terry Kawaja highlight their journalistic achievements in the digital space.Keep Reading

“On TV And Video” is an AdExchanger column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Terence Kawaja, CEO & Founder at LUMA. Allbirds. Warby Parker. Brandless. Peloton. Dollar Shave Club. Over the past several years, an explosion of relatively young startups has garnered significant market share from major brands, some of which had built up their brand equity over decades. These direct-to-consumer brands – alternatively referred to as D2C or DTC – have done just what the name implies: cut out the middle man to go directly to the consumer.Keep Reading

The number of direct-to-consumer brands is ballooning, as are predictions of the traditional FMCG sector’s demise, yet people underestimate the resilience and capability of the established giants.Keep Reading

LUMA CEO Terence Kawaja, whose LUMAscapes showing the vast jumble of marketing-tech players have been staples at marketing conferences for years, unveiled his latest creation at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando on Thursday. The D2C LUMAscape shows direct-to-consumer startups that have been eating away at big established behemoths like Procter & Gamble Co.Keep Reading

It was the week that the TV industry sounded the alarms. Work together. Change who you are. Or die at the hands of FANG. Prominent media M&A banker Terry Kawaja, CEO of LUMA Partners, gathered 80-plus TV and digital executives at a dinner aimed at tackling some of TV’s thorniest issues in light of the growing FANG power.Keep Reading

LUMA presents “The 2018 Summer of Data” featured in AdExchanger’s “Data-Driven Thinking” series.Keep Reading

AdExchanger’s podcast last week had an interview with LUMA Partners’ founder Terry Kawaja. You probably know a little about him because of his famously crowded LUMAscape slide, which features all the old-time ad tech companies that got a piece of the action between advertiser and publisher in the media buying business. You may notice that many of the companies on that slide are gone. And their demise has probably enriched Kawaja, who seems preternaturally able to spot trends.Keep Reading

Terence Kawaja, chief executive at investment bank LUMA Partners, believes an immediate impact will include US telecoms provider Comcast (which also owns NBCUniversal) tabling an offer for 21st Century Fox, to rival that of the existing proposal by Disney, with others to follow.Keep Reading

There can barely have been a moment in time so filled with anxiety over digital advertising techniques as 2018. In the last few years since the advent of “programmatic”, many ad buyers have become used to using customer data from a variety of sources to piece together profiles that can target audiences through networks, wherever they may be.Keep Reading

Publishers like to pretend that consumers can’t live without content – but if 95% of media brands disappeared tomorrow, no one would care, said Rafat Ali, CEO and founder of travel publisher Skift, at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit in New York City on Tuesday.Keep Reading

Every couple of years, marketing observers play a parlor game called “The Ad Tech Shakeout Cometh,” in which they pontificate about the impending decimation of the ad-tech industry.Keep Reading

A new category has appeared in the LUMAscape, the marketing technology taxonomy defined by investment bank LUMA Partners. It’s called “identity,” and it’s much more than just branding or semantics: It’s a fundamental shift in the way marketers approach their customers — the foundation for all brand engagements.Keep Reading

Simply put, these are your recommended action items for taking advantage of the biggest movements sweeping the digital marketing landscape in 2018. Good luck!Keep Reading

When Terry Kawaja takes in the proceedings at CES, he’s not focused on the “flashy consumer-facing stuff that we see on the show floor.” To the Founder and CEO of investment banking firm Luma Partners, it’s all about sub-trends.Keep Reading

Rather than trying to make the change from generic metrics such as clicks and views to measuring true efficiency in one giant leap, there is a mid-step the industry can take along the path to effectiveness and it involves paying more attention to engagement.Keep Reading

If you spend any time on Twitter and follow any media industry people, you’ll often come away dizzy and fairly certain that every media company is buying everyone. It started a year ago when AT&T announced it had reached an agreement to buy Time Warner. Things really turned upside down when 21st Century Fox — just three years after trying to buy Time Warner — signaled it wanted to sell some assets to Disney. Then on Thursday, it was reported that Comcast may buy some of Fox. Or Verizon may.Keep Reading

2017 State of People-Based Measurement Study Pinpoints Person-Level Data as Key to Understanding the Omnichannel Consumer Journey.Business WireKeep Reading

Amazon’s footprint is becoming ubiquitous, it scale seemingly unassailable and its data-driven consumer intelligence advantage gargantuan but, for other online retailers, all is not lost, according to one marketing industry expert.Keep Reading

Digital offers more precise measurement than most channels, which has helped move the industry from an art to a science, according to Brian Andersen of LUMA Partners.Keep Reading

Who would ever have thought that the world’s biggest festival for celebrating creativity in marketing would have ended up discussing artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cognitive technologies?Keep Reading

The ad tech flotilla has become a fixture of Cannes — and the growing presence of ad tech. Ad tech impresario and content marketing master Terry Kawaja hustled to the marina to gin up a handy ad tech map based on his (in)famous LUMAscape industry charts.Keep Reading

LUMA Partners clocked 13 ad tech deals this quarter with 11 acquisitions valued at more than $100 million, a pace similar to its M&A category results for every quarter over the past year.Keep Reading

“There have been numerous articles published about the convergence of ad tech and mar tech, and whether it’s happening or not.Keep Reading

After demystifying the multi-billion digital marketing industry in a presentation last year, the investment bank LUMA Partners has just released its annual State of Digital Marketing presentation.Keep Reading

LUMA Partners released its latest report analyzing M&A and investment highlights in the marketing automation sector.Keep Reading

Facebook has shifted Atlas, the ad tech platform it acquired from Microsoft in 2013, out of its ad tech group and into its measurement division.Keep Reading

Terry Kawaja sits down with Michael Kassan to talk about the industry-encompassing LUMAscapes, charts that plot all the intermediators between advertisers and publishers in the marketplace.Keep Reading

It’s Cannes Lions this week, and even the most cursory of glances up and down La Croisette will tell you that ad tech companies are now a big factor in the equation at this ‘Festival of Creativity’.Keep Reading

The threats are mounting. With challenges like viewability, fraud and ad blocking rising, the online ad industry could risk falling, just as Rome’s empire did before it.Keep Reading

Last year was a good year for mergers and acquisitions (M&A). That’s according to the Q1 2016 Marketing Report released by LUMA Partners, a strategic advisory and boutique investment bank. LUMA also follows and maps the growth of various digital sectors — from mobile, to gaming, to martech.Keep Reading

It’s not entirely gloomy. One of the sector’s seasoned watchers and deal advisors, LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja, describes the segment’s situation as “a tale of two cities”.Keep Reading

2015 wasn’t the best time for an ad tech company to tap the public markets. And 2016 seems like it will be equally uncertain – one need only look at the strange ongoing saga of AppNexus to see that. But it’s an overstatement to say that all ad tech companies are in trouble, according to Brian Andersen of LUMA Partners. He will speak Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference about the ad tech-mar tech convergence and examine what the future holds.Keep Reading

“They’re the sort of boring, block-and-tackling kind of guys that are not paying a lot [for acquisitions], but then turning them into hugely profitable businesses that are growing,” says Terence Kawaja, CEO of LUMA Partners.Keep Reading

“Much has changed in the agency world since then, and that change is accelerating with the growing presence of data and software in the mix.Keep Reading

Meanwhile, data from LUMA Partners, a strategic advisory firm focused on digital media, tells a similar story for the U.S.Keep Reading

The closing session at our last MarTech Conference in San Francisco was an all-star fireside chat, “Follow the Martech Money: VCs, IPOs, and M&A”, with three leading venture capitalists and one of the most influential investment bankers in the marketing tech space, Brian Andersen ChiefmartechKeep Reading

As the now-well-known LUMAscape from LUMA Partners denotes, the ad tech sector is dense, complicated, and poorly understood (even by people who work in the industry): Agency trading desks, ad servers, verification companies, data management platforms, exchanges, demand-side platforms, supply-side-platforms, the list goes on. And that size and complexity not necessarily a sign of health.Keep Reading

There are over 2,500 companies on the many advertising- and marketing-tech industry landscape slides produced by investment bank LUMA Partners, from display to search to video to native. Yet LUMA’s own analysis is that little more than one in 20 will likely exit for more than $75 million.Keep Reading

While advertising-supported digital media is quickly growing, there are much larger opportunities for adtech companies. This exists in the total addressable market (TAM). This includes e-commerce, retail, e-payments, marketing automation and SAS, says Terence Kawaja, CEO and co-founder of the boutique investment bank LUMA Partners, in this interview with Beet.TV.Keep Reading

An Investment Banker Made This Epic Presentation On The Future Of TV.  Business InsiderKeep Reading

If the digital advertising people getting high on “programmatic” trading are to access the $70 billion US TV ad market this way, they had better develop some empathy first, says one of the industry’s leading media finance advisors. LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja says TV ad trading, historically reliant on broad demographic targeting, and digital trading, typically using laser-like scientific targeting, are “in two very different places”. So digital executives trying to unlock TV using programmatic mechanisms must treat TV buyers “in a manner that they’re used to”.Keep Reading

Every good story needs a hero. Back when I wrote The Search, that hero was Google – the book wasn’t about Google alone, but Google’s narrative worked to drive the entire story.Keep Reading

Ad-Tech Companies Struggle to Sell Themselves to Wall Street.Keep Reading

Terence Kawaja, CEO of Luma Partners, is convinced that the digital advertising market is expanding through new start-ups.Keep Reading

VC-backed ad tech firms have arguably inflicted one big mess on digital advertising.Keep Reading

For much of this year, hundreds of little and not-so-little startups that help businesses run advertisements on Facebook have been playing the M&A game, buying rivals or related companies, getting acquired by bigger firms, or both.Keep Reading

The constant battle between TV viewers who want to watch their favorite shows when and where they want broadcast and cable networks that want to maintain their lucrative linear-TV business model is just the tip of a digital media iceberg. Fact is, people want to view all kinds of content, whether it’s TV shows, movies, games, or blogs and magazine stories, wherever they want.Keep Reading