Having trouble understanding -- or, at least, explaining -- the increasingly complex digital advertising landscape? Then thank Terence Kawaja, head of boutique investment firm LUMA Partners, who has
assembled a half dozen graphics to show how 1,240 different ad companies fit into the following categories of online advertising: display, video, search engines, mobile, social, and commerce. The
graphics, Kawaja tells
The Wall Street Journal, help "large strategic acquirers" such as Google, Yahoo and
Adobe to identify possible targets of acquisition. Admits The Journal, "Online advertising is a remarkably complex field." And getting ever more complicated, we might add. Indeed, Kawaja's graphic on
the display-ad market includes newcomers such as TellApart, which helps advertisers do what's called "retargeting," or showing graphical ads to Web users for products they previously expressed
interest in. The new "social" graphic, meanwhile, lists the companies such as Vurve and Efficient Frontier that help marketers advertise on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites like LinkedIn and
Loopt.