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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

Speaking about his outfit’s latest quarterly report, one of the foremost advisors in M&A for the adtech sector Terry Kawaja, chief executive of LUMA Partners, speaks to The Drum about his assessment of the likely outcomes in the mid-to-long term future.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. Oracle Data CloudKeep Reading

Despite predictions that winter is coming to ad tech, deal activity for the ad tech, mar tech and digital media sectors was tentatively healthy in 2016, according to reports released this week by investment banks LUMA Partners, JEGI and Petsky Prunier.Keep Reading

Discussing the AT&T-Time Warner merger with Terry Kawaja, LUMA Partners CEO and Founder, and Peter Kafka, Recode Senior Editor.Keep Reading

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

With the first generation of public ad tech outfits facing growing pressure to provide ever-increasing ROI, investors are becoming savvy to the issues that were formerly the sole concern of the elite in the ad tech sector.Keep Reading

Recode’s editor in chief Dan Frommer and LUMA Partners CEO Terry Kawaja weigh in on the latest battle between Viacom and CBS.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

Study Finds Only 40% of Digital Buys Going to Working Media.Keep Reading

It ocurred to me in that moment that a LUMAscape has been shown or referenced in greater than half of the many presentations and sessions on adtech that I’ve seen.I immediately began reflecting on why. Before I expound on why, let’s start with what.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

LUMA Partners CEO Terry Kawaja explains why investors will be mindful of FitBit’s valuation ahead of its IPO.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

It is with great pleasure that I announce a major expansion of the LUMA partnership. Joining LUMA Partners in our West Coast offices are Mark Greenbaum (second from left) and Dick Filippini (far left); two very experienced bankers from GCA Savvian.Keep Reading

LUMA partners CEO Terence Kawaja says 2015 will see ongoing video tech momentum after the “inflection year” of 2014.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

The founder and CEO of LUMA Partners LLC neatly separated all the major players into two sets, and for about a half an hour Kawaja explained how they’re different, how they’re the same and how ultimately they will work with each other.Keep Reading

This past summer, trade press commentary focused on the impending doom of the Ad Tech space, pointing to the industry’s fragmentation and noting the underperformance of recent IPOs: Millennial Media (MM), Tremor Video (TRMR) and YuMe (YUME). The tides quickly shifted in the fall when Rocket Fuel (FUEL) went public and finished up nearly 100% on its first day of trading. The following month, Criteo (CRTO) also had a successful IPO and, along with Rocket Fuel, trades at higher multiples than the first batch of deals with a market cap well north of a billion dollars.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

According to Gartner, by 2015 the technology budget of CMOs will likely exceed that of CIOs. There is no question that marketing has become more data-driven and technology-driven than in the past. “Analytics,” “algorithms,” “optimization” – terms that in the past were typically relegated to the cubicles of specialized marketing analysts – are now part of the daily conversation in the CMO suite. Much has been written about audience targeting, programmatic buying, real-time bidding, data management, etc., showcasing impressive advances made in advertising over the past few years.Keep Reading

Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO at LUMA Partners, has surveyed the past few week’s notable deals — demand side platforms MediaMath’s acquisition of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS) unit (which his firm helped broker); exchange platform AppNexus’ $75 million venture capital funding; and the shuttering of adBrite’s exchange business.Keep Reading

You can’t move these days for new research indicating the rise of of “second-screeners” — those of us who watch television while using a handheld device. But, as upstart operators scurry around trying to exploit that fact with variants of social or interactive TV add-ons, what is the real business opportunity here?Keep Reading

The biggest challenge an ad solutions provider faces in a pitch session these days in that damnable “Luma Chart,” says Criteo President Greg Coleman. The former sales exec from Huffington Post, Yahoo and AOL now heads the international retargeting company and says that he knows his audience of marketers have heard it all before. “I say thanks for your time, and then I will ask them to promise me they won’t listen to anything I am about to tell them.Keep Reading

When Terence Kawaja started working on a map of the digital advertising universe in 2009, it was never meant to see the light of day.Keep Reading