The Case vs the Luma Display-Ad Slide

One such tool, Terence Kawaja’s Display LUMAscape slide, has no doubt been referenced hundreds of thousands of times by now. In an effort to bring clarity to a confusing and chaotic display advertising landscape, Kawaja amassed nearly every player in the field and placed their logos into high-level classification buckets. Kawaja then attached these buckets with a series of arrows that showed the apparent “flow” from advertiser to publisher.

I remember first seeing the Kawaja slide and being thrilled to have a tool that helps explain to my father – a smart man for whom his son’s industry was a mystery – how what I did related to the more common names he knew like Google and Yahoo. For many, I assume, the slide served as a road map for a town that they may have visited now and then but never knew exactly how to navigate. This kind of instant understanding was, indeed, powerful.

And yet, the Luma slide concerned me. You see, while my company made the slide – and I do not disagree that the bucket we were placed into represented a good starting place for describing what we do – the truth is that there were other buckets I knew we could have also been placed into. I knew there were assets we bring to the table that are dismissed by this static view of the industry. And, as the landscape has only grown more littered, I realize that my concerns were well founded.

As often happens with tools that serve to make the complicated easy, the Kawaja slide is now a crutch our industry relies on. For some, referencing the slide falsely means they don’t have to ask the deeper questions to find out what a company actually does. After all, it’s right there in front of them. But the truth is that most of the companies on the slide do not simply handle one part of the puzzle. What about the exchange that built an industry-leading ad server? Or what about the ad network that offers vast horizontal reach but also offers its inventory in customized verticals while providing its own first-party data as well as seamless integration of all major third-party data providers? What buckets do they go? Assuming that the static snapshot contains all the information needed about a company easily leads to more confusion about the ecosystem’s true dynamics.

Like anything that simplifies a process, Kawaja’s slide is a great tool, but smart advertisers and brands shouldn’t let their understanding of it keep them from asking partners, “What else can you bring to the table?” Perhaps Thoreau himself would best be rewritten as “Simplify! Simplify! … But don’t forget to ask the right questions.”

David Shay is evp of marketing at CPX Interactive.