EVERYTHING YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT LUMASCAPES:  If you’re like me you’ve encountered and appreciated Lumascapes in your career, but never really understood who created them and why they exist at all.  It’s almost like the Lumascape Fairy came to our industry one night and left us a map to sort out our AdTech mess.  As with most things, there’s a much more ordinary story behind the Lumascape, which is superbly told in the attached Digiday link.  For starters, it didn’t come about all at once by just filliping a light switch.  Instead today’s Lumascapes began as a single powerpoint slide in a 2010 digital media presentation and iterated from there.  The inflection point for the Lumascape was the decision to replace company names with their logos.  This suddenly made getting into a Lumascape more important – kind of like a relevancy statement for your brand.  Today’s Lumascapes (image below) are a migraine-in-the-making, with so many micro-logos jammed on to one page.  But just like a Seurat painting, if you step back from the individual dots the big picture will reveal itself and tell an amazing story.  Pretty cool stuff, if you’re in to knowing where our digital media industry came from.

THE AUDIO ROAD MAP, PER PANDORA:  Yesterday Pandora CFO Naveen Chopra presented a near-term vision of the company’s strategic road map at Goldman Sachs’ annual Communicopia Conference.  Some of Mr. Chopra’s most relevant comments are highlighted in the attached RadioI Ink link.  The biggest takeaway by far is the growing importance of voice-enabled digital assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and the soon-to-be Apple Homepod.  This segment is the highest user growth area of Pandora’s business today, and is being compared to the mobile explosion we all saw 4-5 years ago.  Because these products are “by definition audio devices”, there’s a huge opportunity for an audio-only play in a screenless world where display and video advertising becomes obsolete.  Mr. Chopra also touched in the connected car, which is still a dominant platform for audio consumption.  While progress is being made and in-car user growth continues to climb, the adoption curve is much slower due to the simple fact that drivers are keeping their older cars longer than ever.  Over time the connected car will heat up, but for now all eyes are on the power and potential of the connected home.

THE WINNERS AND LOSERS OF M&A-MANIA:  Finally today, I LOVE the attached TechCrunch article on the most monocle-dropping (their words) tech acquisitions over the past five years.  The most fascinating thing about these M&A bets is how brilliantly some played out (FB acquiring Instagram for $1B), while others totally flopped (Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr for $1.1B).  As you go deeper into the slides you’ll see some amazingly big deals in the $25-75B range.  Taken as a timeline, it sort of lays out the growing value of the entire digital ecosystem, which began as a series of VC bets and turned into the primary driver of the US economy.  Fascinating stuff!

Have a great Wednesday guys!