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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

As 2019—and the decade—draw to a close, the media industry has witnessed a host of closures, fire sales and a rapidly accelerating number of mergers in ad tech. Many have dubbed this as the end of the golden era of ad tech, or the ad network, and the beginning of a more Darwinist era where only the strongest in the sector will survive. Click the button to check out Adweek article.Keep Reading

When Terry Kawaja, founder of investment bank LUMA Partners, stood on stage at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual Masters of Marketing conference last year and told a packed crowd that they should fire their CMOs, a challenge was set. Click the button below to review the full article.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

WatchMojo Founder, Ashkan Karbasfrooshan attended LUMA’s Digital Media Summit in New York City, New York. The series consists of published interviews with Peter Horan, Robert Norman, Farhad Massoudi, Jim VandeHei, Sean Alford, Ed Laczynski, John Durham, Peyman Nilforoush, Jack Myers, Bernard Gershon, and Pam Horan.Keep Reading

AdExchanger recaps fireside chat at Publicis Groupe’s Rishad Tobaccowala at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit.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

AdExchanger’s highlights key trends from LUMA’s Brian Andersen’s presentation from the 2019 Industry Preview conference in NYC.Keep Reading

LUMA’s VP Conor McKenna gives the good, the bad, and the ugly on the future of Ad Tech plus the upward boom of MarTech deals and how PE companies are getting in on the action.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 Terry Kawaja gave one of the most provocative talks at the Associate of National Advertisers’ annual “Masters of Marketing” conference. He sits down with AdAge to break down why he’s bullish on the direct-to-consumer trend.Keep Reading

LUMA CEO & Founder Terry Kawaja urged marketers to look at the success models of direct-to-consumer brands at the ANA 2018 Masters of Marketing: Direct Growth conference.Keep Reading

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

The ad-tech sector has taken it on the chin over the last couple years, with the ever-growing dominance of Facebook and Google, early-stage investors impatient for an exit and increased public scrutiny over the use of personal data for ad targeting.Keep Reading

Cheddar’s Peter Gorenstein speaks with LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja at the Cannes lIONS Festival about the media M&A landscape, and what he thinks might be AT&T’s next move.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

Last week, Sorrell publicly stated that he would be “starting again” after he left the company, leading many to speculate about the potential of a new enterprise for the adman. ​Speaking to LUMA Partners chief executive Terence Kawaja at the 2018 Digital Media Summit in New York yesterday, Sorrell gave some clarity on what he would do with what he described as his “fresh start.” CityA.M.Keep Reading

Insight 1: Facebook and Google represent 90% of the growth in digital marketing. This means that for every “new” dollar that enters the system, Facebook and Amazon effectively receive 90 cents, according to Conor McKenna, VP of banking at LUMA Partners and our opening keynote speaker.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

As Luma Partners’ Brian Andersen pointed out in his Industry Preview closing keynote this year, CDP vs. DMP is “not an or … it’s an and.” They do different things.Keep Reading

Will new data protection legislation coming May 25 prove apocalyptic or just a bump in the road? With less than 100 days to go to the European Commission’s new General Data Protection Regulation, the US advertising sector seems split on the issue.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

2018 will see the same amount of deal activity as 2017 as the field of potential buyers expands, predicts Luma Partners’ Brian Andersen.Keep 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

Whether they’re listening to a panel, chatting in the hallways or sitting in an airplane on their way to Cologne, Germany, Dmexco attendees will be bombarded by the Lumascape this week. The Lumascape is a series of charts that organize the madness of ad tech by grouping together similar companies on a single page. But before the charts from investment bank Luma Partners racked up more than 6 million views on the company’s website and spawned endless debate about fragmentation in the ad industry, it was merely a Powerpoint presentation given at an industry event.Keep Reading

Growth in programmatic spend represents a seismic shift in contemporary media practice, with only 13% of display ad sales sold using such technology in 2012, compared to 70% in 2016. Investment advisor outfit LUMA Partners has performed arguably an unrivaled performance in mapping the space (see above for an example of its agenda-setting LUMAscape) but even this is puzzling upon first sight, especially for marketers tasked with a multitude of other responsibilities, besides digital media buying.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

In this video interview, LUMA Partners founder and CEO Terence Kawaja spoke with Beet.TV at LUMA’s own Digital Media Summit, where he delivered a State Of Digital Media address he said puts “the case for optimism”.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

Private equity firms and business interests from the Far East are increasingly taking a stake in the combined adtech and martech space, according to Results International, which also finds that martech is growing in popularity with acquirers.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

Investment banker Terence Kawaja is a big-time player in the advertising technology field. His advisory firm, LUMA Partners, has worked to help companies like Google and Yahoo make multimillion-dollar acquisitions, and his industry knowledge makes him one of the tech world’s most respected minds. He is also, it seems, something of a goof.Keep 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

LUMA Partners founder and CEO Terence Kawaja has long been the grand organizer of the ad tech market. His LUMAscapes have become the most recognizable and easily refereneable maps of who’s involved in the buying and selling of ad inventory, be it display, search, social, video, mobile, etc.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

Terence Kawaja is Founder and CEO of LUMA Partners, a strategic advisory firm focused at the intersection of media and technology. Terence is a seasoned investment banker with more than 20 years of experience and has advised on over $250 billion of transactions.Keep Reading

Ad tech is over. The landscape is overcrowded, venture capitalists have moved on, and real action is elsewhere in tech.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