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Part One: Terry Kawaja’s New York investment bank 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. 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. But consolidation and M&A has been lean of late. Kawaja admits adtech is still notoriously opportunistic and has played a starring role in the creation of some of the problems the market is struggling to address with junk digital data, fake people and opaque trading practices that nobody seems able to solve. Regardless, he sees another incoming wave of tech investment and reckons Google’s global advertising trading system being broken up would have huge financial upside for Alphabet shareholders – and the industry at large. Kawaja thinks Google may even be playing to lose.

The kids are alright, mostly. The percentage of Australians who have only known a digital world is edging inexorably towards a majority, yet the digital experiences of government and business are still anchored in the messy transitional world of those who also remember a world of real things. To ensure they are delivering the best experiences, brands and governments need to take much more account of the changing relationship the community has with technology according to a report from R/GA. It’s a world already familiar to executives we spoke to at Kit (part of CommBank’s X-15 ventures) and Bendigo and Adelaide’s Up Bank.

Responsive rates upwards of 45 per cent against single digit email results, 100:1 ROI on spend, 37 per cent conversion rates on fast cart abandonment – the figures for why retailers say they’re increasingly leaning into SMS as a strategic alternative channel to email are stacking up. Even better: The money invested is not going into Google’s coffers and instead being used to build up the strength of their first-party data sets and insights. During the recent Attentive event in Sydney, marketing and business leaders from Lounge Lovers, Designstuff and Hey Bud spoke to Mi3 about the surprisingly full-funnel ways they’re now tapping SMS – many in increasingly personalised ways, but some even with the odd dose of spray and pray. But given the spam and email abuses of the past, will marketers be able to stop themselves from overusing SMS?

YouTube is out to prove its breadth of niche long-form content gets audiences more engaged than they might be elsewhere. It’s hired Kantar to help make a solid case that this so called ‘flow state’ makes audiences more receptive to new information – i.e. advertising. And it’s also making some bold claims about how YouTube reduces ecom returns. But Neuro Insight’s Peter Pynta queries whether such macro level observations go deep enough, and importantly, whether they can really be applied to advertising. From those deciding where spend goes, the feedback was mixed. Buyers are not yet convinced that it translates to all-important advertising effectiveness – and some say YouTube’s jamming in plenty of ads that might break that flow state.