Author: admin

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.

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.

Ditching Athena’s ‘Love us and leave us’ proposition wasn’t an option for the digital-first home loan upstart’s marketing chief, Sarah Sproule. But it appears most of the other marketing, product and customer value propositions have shaken up as the business broadens out from its price-based roots and makes a play for a diversified mix of customers. So far its working – and Sproule says the focus and KPIs are now way deeper than cost per acquisition, with marketing “on the hook all the way through to final conversion, which is settlement”. She’s firmly in “get shit done” mode – and with brokers now a key channel, B2B is next.