AdTech Banker Kawaja: Video Ad Platforms Need To Differentiate

If you are tired of trying to distinguish one “end-to-end, full-service video targeting and decisioning” vendor from another, imagine how people from outside the digital video industry must feel.

LUMA partners CEO Terence Kawaja says 2015 will see ongoing video tech momentum after the “inflection year” of 2014: “We’ve just seen 28 transactions across the video Lumascape, involving 13 over $100m, just since AOL-Adap.tv.”

But Kawaja says public investment in video ad tech firms has softened lately, because there is a “misunderstanding in public markets in terms of what some of these companies do”: “Sustainability … is not always clear because companies talk about their offerings in a very similar way, whether they’re on the media end of the spectrum or the technology end.

“There’s a maturation that needs to happen for public investors to get a better sense for distinguishing between companies in this space.”

He was interviewed by Beet.TV at the TV Of Tomorrow show in New York.