Looking at investment banker Terry Kawaja’s famous landscape slide of advertising technology leaves many shaking their heads. Who are all these companies? What value to they provide that the dozens of other logos do not? The sensible reaction is to decry the “complexity” of advertising technology. (Digiday certainly has.) And yet, according to Kawaja himself, there’s a larger, if related problem: duplication. The fact of the matter is, many of these companies aren’t providing something all that special from the others. They persist because of the surplus of venture capital flowing into advertising technology. Kawaja spoke to this in his presentation at Ad:Tech yesterday.
Read a rundown of Kawaja’s presentation on AllVoices. Follow Kawaja on Twitter @tkawaja.
More in Media
Mega creators find that their personalities alone aren’t scalable as standalone businesses
Successful creators like Alex Cooper or MrBeast are creating media companies, to varying degrees of success and struggle.
Media Briefing: Publishers cautiously count AI licensing as notable revenue amid programmatic strain, in Q1 earnings
Amid declining referral traffic and programmatic ads, publishers are beginning to see meaningful revenue from AI licensing deals.
Retailers are rushing to build AI apps. It’s unclear if shoppers will use them
There are almost 900 apps on ChatGPT and 353 Claude connectors, according to AppDiscoverability.com, which tracks AI app data.