Luma Partners

CANNES — DirecTV is transforming beyond its satellite TV roots, now offering premium streaming services and leveraging data analytics to support advertisers. The company is seeing strong growth in its streaming product, DirecTV Stream, while maintaining its satellite business. In this fireside at Cannes Lions, attendees learned how DirecTV emphasizes customer-centric approaches and data collaboration with […]

The digital ecosystem is bracing for a potential bonanza in 2025, according to Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of LUMA Partners. It may have been a bumpy couple of years – but the industry’s leading deal-maker says the economy is back. In this video interview with Beet.TV in advance of POSSIBLE 2024 in Miami April […]

With the global situation and inflation hitting the economy, what is the outlook for the digital media business? Resilient with a pinch of evolution, according to one of the industry’s most looked-to joiner of dots. In this video interview with Beet.TV during his own Digital Media Summit (DMS) East this week, Terry Kawaja, Founder & […]

AdTech is booming. Our podcast guest this week is Terry Kawaja, founder and CEO of LUMA Partners, who explains what’s happening and where things are going. Many of you know him for his industry visualizations called the LUMAscape, his firm’s deals, his speeches and his very humorous take on things in his clever videos.  He […]

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 […]

Apple may have delayed a big change to the way advertisers can get user data from iOS devices – but the change will still be profound for advertisers. More than that, however, the change could have a destructive effect on sections of the overall economy, right when many businesses are suffering from the effects of […]

SAN FRANCISCO– Data is an ecosystem, and maintaining that ecosystem is paramount to the health of the industry, says Luma CEO Terry Kawaja. Speaking with Beet.TV’s Jon Watts at LiveRamp’s RampUp Summit, Kawaja says that LiveRamp’s partnerships-driven business helps the industry to function. “Everyone either contributes data, utilizes data or applies data in a cooperative […]

SANTA BARBARA — The marketing industry has been thrown in to 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 deal makers responsible […]

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 […]

LAS VEGAS—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 […]

Don’t call it a comeback but, after coming through a period in which a slowdown was capped by new regulation, MarTech 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 […]

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 Founder & CEO of LUMA Partners 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 […]

When The New Yorker writer Ken Auletta decided to take a hard look at companies that are dependent upon advertising, he came away seeing “frenemies” everywhere—all of them facing “existential assault.” The resulting book, being released today after three years of research, is titled Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else). […]

There can barely have been a moment in time so filled with anxiety over digital advertising techniques as 2018. In the last few years since the advent of “programmatic”, many ad buyers have become used to using customer data from a variety of sources to piece together profiles that can target audiences through networks, wherever […]

Will new data protection legislation coming May 25 prove apocalyptic or just a bump in the road? With less than 100 days to go to the European Commission’s new General Data Protection Regulation, the US advertising sector seems split on the issue. On the one hand, expert ad-tech deal-maker LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja says GDPR […]

LAS VEGAS – When Terry Kawaja takes in the proceedings at CES, he’s not focused on the “flashy consumer-facing stuff that we see on the show floor.” To the Founder and CEO of investment banking firm Luma Partners, it’s all about sub-trends. This means that things like self-driving cars, drones, artificial intelligence and virtual reality […]

COLOGNE — Amazon’s footprint is becoming ubiquitous, it scale seemingly unassailable and its data-driven consumer intelligence advantage gargantuan. But, for other online retailers, all is not lost, according to one marketing industry expert. LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja says ad-tech firm Criteo’s acquisition of HookLogic last year offers hope that the long tail of rival […]

CANNES — Who would ever have thought that the world’s biggest festival for celebrating creativity in marketing would have ended up discussing artificial intelligence, blockchain and cognitive technologies? But all these new-wave developments could be set to revolutionise advertising, as well as the other industries they touch. Companies like IBM and Microsoft are pitching their cognitive […]

With fears of an advertising duopoly, concerns about shady agency practices, a downturn in VC funding and mounting anger at programmatic opacity, there are plenty of reasons to be bearish about the digital advertising ecosystem right now. But one of the leading thinkers and M&A advisers in the space doesn’t want you to forget the sector’s positive […]

National marketers want “scale that’s smart” by combining the best data from digital platforms with premium television content. And to close the loop, they want to be able to transact on a currency that reflects their desired business outcomes, says NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino. She wants to “shine a light on the need for […]