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LUMA: After The 2022 Doldrums, 2023 Will Be A Better Year For M&A By Allison Schiff Tired in 2022: Growth at all costs. Wired in 2023: Realistic ad tech valuations. “We were in a 12-year bull run with very low interest rates for such a long time that the push towards growth had gotten a little out of hand,” said Conor McKenna, a director at LUMA Partners. Last week, LUMA released its full-year market report analyzing the state of digital media and marketing in 2022.Keep Reading

From the freely flowing rosé all day to the lavish cocktail hours and concerts at night, Cannes Lions is all about excess. “What recession?” quipped Luma Partners founder and CEO Terence Kawaja in a tweet with a graphic highlighting the many glamorous mega-yachts sponsored by ad-tech companies, publishers, and platforms that are once again a presence at the festival this year. But even on the sunny French Riviera, with its azure beaches and palm trees, the storm clouds of a possible economic downturn have cast a shadow over conversations during the week of networking, deal-making, and creative celebration.Keep Reading

Following a brace of acquisition deals where it announced its intention to spend up to an (estimated) $70 billion on Activision Blizzard and Xandr, Microsoft’s advertising ambitions are starting to become a bit more clear. Speaking earlier this week at the Digital Media Summit hosted by LUMA Partners, an investment bank known for brokering deals in the ad tech sector, Microsoft Advertising Corporate VP Rob Wilk outlined his vision to take on adland’s triumvirate. Click the button to review the full article.Keep Reading

Is ad tech’s hot streak on the public market sustainable? No, and that’s not a bad thing. After four quarters of spiking valuations and an IPO runway so crowded that one ad tech company opted to postpone its IPO until next year, the market is starting to stabilize. LUMA Director Conor McKenna explores the key factors affecting the market. Click the button to read the article and download LUMA’s Q3 2021 Market Report for the full analysis.Keep Reading

After years of debate, Apple Inc. and Google are making separate moves to effectively kill the software marketers use to track your online activity and tailor ads specifically for you. The moves are upending the way companies have reached audiences and made money from ads since the earliest days of the internet. Review the article noting LUMA’s Terence Kawaja own personal twist on Apple’s ATT system.Keep Reading

Seven ad tech companies made transactions valued at over $1 billion in the first quarter of 2021 – double the amount that’s happened in the past few years combined. “We’ve got a perfect storm here of different forces lining up, which created such a strong quarter,” said Conor McKenna, LUMA Partners Director. The ad tech investment banking firm LUMA tallied up recent deals in its Q1 2021 Market Report last week. To check out Conor McKenna’s full interview on the market in the article, click the button.Keep Reading

Terence Kawaja, Founder & CEO, LUMA Partners Investment Banking, on their new SPAC LUMAscape which maps over 250 SPACs by sector and status. Hosted by Carol Massar. Click the button to listen to the interview.Keep Reading

Experian has purchased Tapad from international telco Telenor in a deal valued at $280 million as the credit rating company furthers its investment in identity resolution services. Terence Kawaja, CEO of investment bank Luma Partners, helped broker the deal between Experian, Tapad and Telenor, and said the $80 million reduction in sale price between 2016 and now is indicative of how privacy legislation, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, has altered earlier business plans in the space. Click the button to read the article.Keep Reading

After a rocky few years, adtech stocks are soaring once again. The adtech rally flies somewhat in the face of trends at the beginning of the pandemic, when many advertisers hit pause on spending before spending started recovering around May. Moreover, with tough competition with Google and Facebook for digital ad dollars and a string of high-profile casualties in the space, investors had long turned their back on the adtech sector. To be sure, much of the resurgence in adtech stocks has little to do with the sector itself and more with the wider macroeconomic environment, experts say.Keep Reading

After a harsh first half of the year – Q2 was particularly gloomy – the M&A market is starting to rebound. Deal activity was up in the third quarter with particular momentum in gaming and digital audio, although ad tech and mar tech made a respectable showing, according to a Q3 market report from investment bank LUMA Partners released last week. Click the button to review the article.Keep Reading

Having built essential industry investment/deal guides called “LUMAscapes,” visual presentations of interrelated businesses in the media, marketing and adtech industries, investment bank LUMA Partners has introduced the Black LUMAscape, a diagram and directory that charts scores of Black-owned and founded businesses. We spoke with LUMA founder and CEO Terry Kawaja about the new effort and his hopes that it drives more investment to these businesses. Click the button to watch the interview. To view the Black LUMAscape, click here.Keep Reading

The release of the Black LUMAscape is an attentive response that aims to: Support the cause for equal access, visibility, and innovation from the Black community Enable and promote targeted economic benefit and Align with LUMA’s voice in the market Click the button to view the article. For the Black LUMAscape, click here.Keep Reading

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 coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the volatility of the typical revenue model in ad tech, whereby companies are largely reliant on taking a percentage of media spend and is accelerating the push for more stable modes of income. Terry Kawaja, CEO of LUMA Partners, explains that it’s up to a brand or agency’s procurement team to buy a SaaS offering, and that can be difficult when budgets are planned against a percentage of media, not around technology solutions. Oftentimes, such teams calculate the associated costs as a percent of media.Keep Reading

Lawyer, stand-up comedian, and an investment banker?! LUMA’s Terence Kawaja talks about how content marketing skills, storytelling, and comedy led to his success as an investment banker in Superpowers Podcast with Bill Wise and Chris Cunningham. Watch Terry’s Comedy in Business presentation on how you can use comedy (or your own unique unusual skills) to enhance your branding and marketing skills.Keep Reading

The gap between the haves and the have nots in ad tech has never been starker: There is the high-flying company like The Trade Desk with a market capitalization of more than $13 billion. And at the other end is a laundry list of bankruptcies, firesales and companies going out of business altogether. And as the market consolidates, a set of opportunist buyers — the vulture capitalists — are ready to pounce on the remains.Keep Reading

LUMA CEO Terence Kawaja’s latest tweet throws down the “election” gauntlet for CES attendees to choose between speakers Mediaocean’s CEO Bill Wise and the White House’s Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump. Both speakers are scheduled to appear on separate stages same time. Click the button below to check out AdAge’s take on the post.Keep Reading

In a conversation that ranges from the upcoming streaming wars to the ongoing direct-to-consumer trend to a look ahead at next month’s CES, Terence Kawaja gives a general sense of the state of things from his vantage point of an investment banker obsessed with digital media and marketing. Oh, he is also, pretty funny. For an investment banker.Keep Reading

SANTA BARBARA — The marketing industry has been thrown into turmoil by a collection of digital privacy scandals and regulatory responses that have changed the nature of ad targeting. But it will recover as one which executes similar opportunities on a different basis. That is according to one of the arch dealmakers responsible for stewarding billions of dollars in ad-tech M&A activity in the last few years.Keep Reading

McDonald’s is starting to throw a few ideas on the grill after spending around $300 million to acquire personalization and decision logic tech startup Dynamic Yield in March.Keep Reading

The online advertising world is now navigating a set of seemingly contradictory trends. On the one hand, technology which pieces together the various parts of audience’s online identity is becoming important. Yet, on the other, regulation is now limiting some of the excesses of ad targeting. The digital marketing world’s arch deal-maker says that adds up to a “double-edged sword”.Keep Reading

In Westwood One and LeadsRx first-ever direct-to-consumer media attribution and awareness report, a historical account of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands effect on digital media & radio and the projection of their future are accessed with insights from digital industry leaders.Keep Reading

To maintain incremental growth, today’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) darlings are looking to expand beyond the digital sandbox where they grew up. After years of slathering on the search and Facebook ads, DTC brands are approaching a saturation point in these channels.Keep Reading

Having categorized more than 400 marketers in the direct-to-consumer space, LUMA Partners knows what has helped to make many of them successful. Trying to imitate them within the confines of traditional marketing isn’t easy, so some legacy companies are acquiring them for both their market share and contemporary culture, according to Founder & CEO Terry Kawaja.Keep Reading

With 2018 in the rearview mirror, a few of the year’s main events still appear larger than life. AdAge highlights 10 stories that will continue to reverberate through the media and marketing industries well into 2019 and beyond.Keep Reading

Direct-to-Consumer Brand Success Offers Lessons for All Marketers November 1, 2018 by Terry Kawaja, Founder and CEO, LUMA Partners A week ago I delivered my keynote presentation to an overflow ballroom at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando, Florida. My provocative title, Fire Your CMO: Marketing’s Future Will Not Resemble Its Past, was designed to drive tune in (check the box) and get marketers thinking hard (another check) by examining the Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) phenomenon that is sweeping marketing.Keep Reading

The presentation led by investment banker Terry Kawaja of LUMA proved to be one of the more popular sessions at the Association of National Advertisers annual “Masters of Marketing” conference, which drew an estimated 3,000 people to the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando resort.Keep Reading

LUMA CEO Terry Kawaja sits down with the Association of National Advertisers’ Group EVP Bill Duggan for a one-on-one interview on LUMA, the new LUMAscapes, and Terry’s speaking engagement at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference set for October 24, 2018.Keep Reading

While there are tactical ways to make advertising more relevant, Terry Kawaja believes there’s a bigger concept at play: relegating interruptive advertising to the past. The CEO & Founder of LUMA will be one of some 250 industry leaders attending The Relevance Conference hosted by AT&T in Santa Barbara on Sept. 24-26. On the opening day he will join Otter Media’s Tony Goncalvez and others on a panel titled Putting A Price On Content that will explore the “happy medium” between paid subscription models and ad-supported media.Keep Reading

Online advertising companies have struggled for several years as Google and Facebook solidified their grip on digital dollars, slowing revenue for the others. Now, many ad tech companies and their investors are throwing up their hands.Keep Reading

Just a week after its $85bn Time Warner takeover was rubber-stamped, US telco AT&T is reportedly in talks to purchase adtech outfit AppNexus, in a move that would better enable it to take on the likes of Facebook and Google.Keep Reading

Speaking at the 2018 Digital Media Summit, in New York City, Sorrell spoke on stage with LUMA Partners chief executive Terence Kawaja about his thoughts on the current media landscape, including where the biggest opportunities lie, with the former WPP chief describing the period since his WPP exit as “a fresh start”.Keep Reading

Sir Martin Sorrell has hinted at what he will do next after leaving advertising group WPP following allegations of personal misconduct. Speaking to LUMA Partners Chief Executive Terence Kawaja at the company’s Digital Media Summit in New York on Tuesday, Sorrell implied he would set up a new agency.Keep Reading

ESPN’s first attempt to cut out the cable guy and bring sports programming directly to consumers launched on Thursday. Its new streaming video product, ESPN+, comes wrapped inside a re-launched ESPN app and costs $4.99 a month.Keep Reading

For mar tech companies, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) preparation starts by acknowledging that they handle personal data.Keep Reading

In 50 secs LUMA CEO Terence Kawaja solves the problem. How To Fix The Future interview w/ Andrew Keen.Keep Reading

Terrence Kawaja, co-founder and chief executive of investment bank Luma Partners, points to his outfit’s recent market report which demonstrates that the total number of M&A deals in the US digital media sector between 2016 and 2017 rose from 236 to 252.Keep Reading

The ad tech industry also saw what Luma Partners CEO and founder Terence Kawaja called the Great Ad Tech Cleanup, wherein he predicted no public ad tech company will have an I/O model by Q1 2018.Keep Reading

Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of LUMA Partners, joins BNN to discuss Disney’s deal with 21st Century Fox.Keep Reading

ad:tech New York 2017, the original industry authority for marketing and media technology practitioners and digitally savvy brand marketers, announced the recipients of the 2017 ad:tech Industry Achievement Award: Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB); Terence Kawaja, Founder and CEO, LUMA; Pam Horan, Co-Founder, Horan MediaTech Advisors; and Heidi Browning, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President, National Hockey League.Keep Reading

Once a well-kept secret among German media and ad tech executives, Dmexco has evolved into a sprawling monster of a trade show, the tentpole, global event in the digital marketing calendar.Keep Reading

Business Insider caught up with Terry at the Cannes Lions in the South of France where he told us what he sees in the future of media and tech. We talked about Snapchat, Sprinklr, the upcoming Appnexus IPO, and whether it’s a good idea for cable companies like Verizon to buy media companies like Yahoo and AOL.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

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

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

Like any emerging market, timing is everything for venture capitalists. Being too late is a missed opportunity, and being too early is a good way to flush funds down the drain.Keep Reading

“We recently revisited the premise that advertising and marketing technologies are converging.Keep Reading

Another day, another Chinese group splashing out on ad tech.Keep Reading

If you’re interested in separating the signal from the noise in the digital media echo-chamber then LUMA Partners’ recent 2016 State of Digital Media report is a great place to start.Keep Reading

Worries about fraud and fragmentation may prompt a shake-out in the crowded online-ad industry.Keep Reading

Diversification is the fuel for digital advertising success.Keep Reading

If you need an indication that an industry is facing an existential crisis, you won’t do much better than one of digital advertising’s most familiar luminaries turning to gore to make a point.Keep Reading

Earlier this year, Terrence Kawaja, well-known investment banker and ad tech divinator, rattled many nerves when he predicted an imminent wave of consolidations and failures in the ad tech sector. Of the roughly 2,000 companies involved in advertising technology, he estimated that no more than 150 will live to see a successful liquidity event.Keep Reading

Observe the infamous mobile LUMAscape. There’s currently no better visualization of this piecemeal solution today – a solution still fraught with failure.Keep Reading

Investment banker Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of LUMA Partners, the company famed for its LUMAscapes, has a new, epic presentation on the state of digital media. It takes a specific focus on digital media and marketing.Keep Reading

More than $15 billion of ad spend will be transacted through programmatic channels this year, and that budget will flow through a famously fragmented set of technology systems. But what specifically are the steps behind a programmatic transaction? How does a single ad move across the LUMAscape? In this post, we will break down the 5 key steps of every programmatic impression.Keep Reading

Outside Voices: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Digital Advertising The Wall Street JournalKeep 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

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

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, 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

In the technology world, big companies that buy smaller ones often will map out dozens of potential acquisition targets. Why shouldn’t the start-ups and their investors be able to size up the potential buyers? Now they can.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