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

M&A activity in the sector was up 20.6% year over year in October with 252 deals recorded by S&P Global Market Intelligence. The jump in activity is notable because M&A activity had returned to normal by October 2020 after a pandemic-related dip. The 209 transactions recorded a year ago were 0.5% more than the same month in 2019, itself a healthy year for information technology deal activity. October also saw a new face among the biggest information technology transaction advisers as LUMA Partners LLC advised on a transaction between Twitter Inc.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

Ad Tech is back in vogue with the investment community and, more importantly, buyers, as the once unpopular sector is one of a handful that have benefited from the Covid-19 pandemic. Speaking at Adweek’s Outlook 2021: The Year Ahead in Marketing and Media event Wednesday, Terence Kawaja, CEO of investment bank LUMA Partners, told virtual attendees that after a dip in M&A activity in early 2020, the ad-tech, mar-tech and digital content sector saw a 20% annual increase in deals with 96 such purchases in Q4. Click the link to read the full article.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

LUMA Partners behind more than $300 billion of digital media and marketing transactions during the past two decades. CEO Terence Kawaja in a fireside chat with Megaphone’s Brendan Monaghan on Podcast Movement panel states that podcasting is one of the media he is most bullish about in the coming years. Click the button to read the article.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

Investment bank LUMA Partners LLC has made Black-owned media, marketing and technology companies the focus of the latest installment in its LUMAscape series of charts, which investors and others use as industry references, amid a broad push for racial justice. Terence Kawaja, a founder of LUMA and its chief executive, said the company drew up the “Black LUMAscape” to raise awareness of Black-owned companies in industries that have been criticized for their lack of diversity. The new chart includes technology firm StackShare, The Weather Channel and direct-to-consumer beauty company Pat McGrath Labs. Click the button to read the full article.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

It was a chilly Q1 for ad tech deal-making, and you can expect more of the same in the second quarter. But you can’t blame it all on COVID-19 – at least not entirely. The ongoing health crisis is only accelerating trends that were already rolling, said Terry Kawaja, CEO and founder of investment bank LUMA Partners, which released its Q1 2020 market report on Tuesday. Click the button below to check out the full article.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

Last year, Direct to Consumer (D2C) brands stole the show, most notably in Terry Kawaja’s presentation, ‘Fire your CMO‘ presentation. This year, as first-time sponsors, we were surprised that D2C brands were largely absent from both the stage and the conference floor. Click the button to read the full article.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For companies in the crowded online advertising sector it’s been a bumpy ride in the past few years.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

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

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

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

If you want to get a handle on what’s happening with TV and the state of the digital video market, investment bank LUMA Partners’ CEO Terence Kawaja delivered another of his epic presentations at VidCon last month on exactly that.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

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

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

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

The recent flurry of media M&A activities, including the AT&T DirectTV deal, means that the big players are “lining up their assets” in advance of the inevitable convergence of TV and digital video, says Terence Kawaja, head of LUMA Partners, a boutique New York investment bank specializing in digital media, in this interview with Beet.TV.Keep Reading

Kevin Spacey, most recently better known as Frank Underwood, everyone’s favorite political operator, gives us a rousing speech on the convergence of platforms and forms of entertainment. iPad versus the big screen — who cares, he says. Audiences care about stories. And it’s all content.Keep Reading

JetBlue Has Used About 40 Firms to Get Its Message Out.WSJKeep 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. And he sees the clear formation of the ad tech industry consolidation that industry participants and observers believed was coming two years ago.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