NEW YORK – Terry Kawaja, CEO and founder of Luma Partners, knows the ad tech/martech ecosystem better than most. He’s not so sure there is room for a flurry – let alone a whole Lumascape slide worth – of clean room startups.
“I have a mixed view on clean rooms,” Kawaja told Beet.TV. “Do you need solutions to help companies propagate first party data? Of course we need that functionality. But I push back on this notion of data clean rooms – so what?”
Kawaja’s contention is that standalone data clean rooms are likely companies build around a single product feature, one that is best suited to be combined with a fuller suit of marketing cloud tools and services.
He’s pushing for a new acronym – data collaboration platforms, which in his view will offer brands a fuller range of features and use cases.
If you’re a startup betting on building just another clean room product, “I wouldn’t want to rely on that single proposition,” he said. “In the long run, it makes sense to combine.”
The good news is, that even in this uncertain economy, investment and opportunities abound. “The beauty of this ecosystem is that’s there’s always new money and new innovation,” he said.
