Logo & Article: M13
Seven companies now account for a third of the total value of the US S&P 500 – and the bulk of their collective trillions in market value happens to come from marketers and advertising. It’s a crazy number, but Terry Kawaja, the fast talking banker, considered by some the ‘godfather’ of adtech start-up investment, says another wave of advertising and marketing related tech spin offs are incoming that’s making him a little more bullish than the cooling of the past 18 months.
Kawaja’s New York firm Luma Partners is behind the Lumascape spaghetti maps that try to make sense of the sprawling, connected pipes of the adtech industry. Kawaja thinks consolidation has to happen for the industry to shake the cowboys – “the environment is highly fragmented and that allows people to hide,” he says.
That’s code for nefarious market behaviour which undermines adtech’s credibility – and Kawaja argues a clean digital ad system is more important now than ever if open web players are to compete with big tech, especially as he sees retail media quickly eating a third of open web ad dollars.
Listen to the interview: Mi3