Online advertising is a remarkably complex field. Terence Kawaja has a new way for potential investors to visualize it.
The market involves hundreds of small and large companies that help advertisers reach consumers and help website publishers, mobile-application developers, search engines and other digital destinations generate revenue through advertising.
Kawaja, who runs boutique investment firm LUMA Partners, spent months putting together six new graphics that show how 1,240 different companies fit into the following categories of online advertising: display, video, search engines, mobile, social, and commerce. (See slides below, or click here for the LUMA site.)
The graphics, Kawaja says, help “large strategic acquirers” such as Google, Yahoo and Adobe to identify possible targets of acquisition.
Kawaja, well-known in the online advertising industry, rose to greater prominence after publishing a graphic in 2009 that attempted to make sense of one particularly fragmented aspect of online advertising: the market for graphical, interactive and video ads, a category known as display, which generated $10 billion in U.S. spending last year, according to eMarketer. The graphic became an important tool used by online ad executives.
For instance, after the graphic was published Kawaja represented Invite Media in its acquisition by Google last year. (Invite allows advertisers to buy ads through digital exchanges that match websites with advertisers, known in the industry as a demand-side platform).
Kawaja’s 2011 graphic on the display-ad market includes newcomers such as TellApart, which helps advertisers do what’s called “retargeting,” or showing graphical ads to Internet users for products they previously expressed interest in. The new “social” graphic lists the companies such as Vurve and Efficient Frontier that help marketers advertise on Facebook, Twitter and other social-networking-type sites such as LinkedIn and Loopt.
The graphics, which Kawaja is branding as “LUMAscapes,” will evolve as he receives feedback about other companies that should make the cut. Some ad executives say the graphics will be a point of discussion during this week’s Digital Media Summit, a gathering of chief executives of private Internet companies as well as investors in New York.
Check below for the full list of new graphics, and click on the images for the larger version.
- Mobile LUMAscape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Search LUMAscape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Commerce LUMAscape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Video LUMAScape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Display LUMAScape [Click the image to enlarge]
- Social LUMAScape [Click the image to enlarge]
via blogs.wsj.com