Talking Stack identifies LUMA’s Digital Brief 024 — Market Report Q2 2019 as the “Report of the week”. Podcast team David Raab, Chitra Iyer, and Anand Thaker talk about the rise and rise of the customer data management space as well as how the need for improved data activation and platform integration is going to impact the space; the need for a D2C expert on the Talking Stack and other little nuggets from the report.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

Last month, French ad holding giant Publicis announced that it was shelling out $4.4 billion to acquire Alliance Data’s Epsilon marketing unit to bolster its data capabilities and expand its digital business in North America. That move makes the company more relevant to its clients, Rishad Tobaccowala, Publicis’ chief growth officer, said, speaking to former GroupM executive Rob Norman at the LUMA’s Digital Media Summit on Tuesday in New York City.Keep Reading

IBM is bowing out of MarTech and offloading its marketing cloud assets – for the second time. Competition from the other scaled marketing players was fierce and Big Blue’s heart hasn’t been in it for a while. LUMA Partner’s Terence Kawaja weighs in on IBM’s exit from the MarTech space.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

Many of the hot brands in retail today didn’t exist a decade ago. But now, backed by big-time venture capital, new direct-to-consumer players are making enough waves in the retail landscape that heritage players are forced to pay attention. Larger brands caught dueling for consumer dollars might do well to adopt some of the marketing strategies that startup brands have deployed from infancy. Check out LUMA’s Terry Kawaja in AdAge’s latest article.Keep Reading

Legacy brands may struggle to compete with direct-to-consumer rivals unless they consider making acquisitions in this space, according to Terry Kawaja, CEO & Founder of LUMA Partners, a New York-based investment bank.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

DPAA President and CEO Barry Frey caught up with LUMA CEO Terry Kawaja for a quick look at LUMA and what Terry will be addressing at the Video Everywhere Summit on October 30.Keep Reading

Don’t call it a comeback but, after coming through a period in which a slowdown was capped by new regulation, ad-tech consolidation may be back in-play. So says Terry Kawaja, the M&A advisor who has had a hand in many of the biggest media and advertising tech deals of the last decade. Despite fears that GDPR and an American equivalent could nix many modern ad-tech practices, Kawaja notes that the lights are still on and deals are still being done – in precisely the area thought to be under threat.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

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. This week’s podcast guest LUMA Partners CEO Terry Kawaja talks about LUMA’s approach and shares his current view on the market.Keep Reading

Mazel tov, it’s a merger. On Tuesday, Judge Richard Leon gave his blessing to AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The judgment capped five weeks of testimony, six weeks of deliberation and a fair amount of nail-biting in executive suites from Dallas to New York City. The deal sets a precedent that can be leveraged by other companies, said LUMA Partners founder and CEO Terry Kawaja.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, the former chief executive of advertising giant WPP Plc, described himself as a “realist” regarding the challenges facing traditional media and advertising companies and emphasized the need for scale during an interview at an ad-industry event. On stage with LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja at the company’s Digital Media Summit in New York on Tuesday, Mr. Sorrell continued to point to the growing advertising and programming strength of Amazon.com Inc. and its potential to challenge television companies as well as the advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook Inc.Keep Reading

Despite broad concerns about the viability of online media and advertising, M&A in the sector is heating up thanks to the growth of ecommerce and commerce-based media solutions, like Apple’s purchase of digital subscription service Next Issue Media for an undisclosed amount.Keep Reading

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

LUMA’s founder and CEO, Terry Kawaja, billed 2017 as a period for “healthy clean-up” in the media and marketing space, as a number of public ad tech firms trading at low valuations were acquired or taken private.Keep Reading

2017 was a busy year of M&A for the digital media and marketing sector, according to reports released by investment banks JEGI and LUMA Partners this week. But the big story, according to LUMA, was in ad tech, where increasing consolidation led to “healthy clean-up activity,” said Founder and CEO Terry Kawaja.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

It’s been a long time since industry analysts expressed optimism about the fate of big-box retailers, but a ray of light just crept in. Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Home Depot each topped earnings estimates and demonstrated strong year-over-year growth.Keep Reading

The digital media investment banking firm Luma Partners released its quarterly report documenting M&A trends across the marketing technology and media landscape.AdExchangerKeep 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

If you’ve been to a digital media event, you’ve seen the LUMAscape, showing the vast number of programmatic advertising firms that dot the industry. Some see innovations; others see a mess. LUMA founder Terry Kawaja sees opportunity.Keep Reading

Venture capital for ad tech slowed down, while mergers and acquisitions rose. And as fake news became one of the hottest topics in the media industry, it became more apparent than ever that some ad tech companies profited from proliferating fake news while others banked on preventing ads from reaching fake-news sites.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

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

Are the Chinese buyers that have been feasting on Western ad tech companies just starting on their appetizers?Keep Reading

The distinction between the two sectors is increasingly blurring, but investors say a predictable revenue model is key.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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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