Introducing: The DeathScape

If you’re in Advertising Technology, you can sure as hell bet you’ve heard about the LUMAscape.

Display Advertising (Ad Tech) Lumascape

The Lumascape is the defacto overview of the Advertising Technology industry, as produced by Luma Partners. It establishes the companies that matter, their industry focus, and to some extent how valuable they are or the impact they’re having on the industry.

The value of the Lumascape is obvious:

1. It helps newcomers understand the industry and it provides some clarity to the chaos. Especially when companies are being acquired, going out of business, or going public.
2. It’s also, to some extent, a massive ego trap: if you’re on the Lumascape you’re proud and will share it widely; if you’re not, you’re jealous. If you’re not and your competitors are, you’re probably furious. You may even politic the folks at Luma Partners to end up on it next year.
3. Luma Partners, of course, receives its own value: it produces these charts as a way to attract potential customers to their banking capabilities. By delivering the Lumascape they prove their knowledge and expertise in the AdTech category.

Today there are versions of Lumascapes for every industry— or at least for every industry that matters.

Over the past few months we’ve been trying to find something like the Lumascape for the $26b death industry. Industry insiders — CEOs of the biggest companies and tech providers — have blanked on finding a resource like this:

“Nope, have never seen anything like that,” they offer.

More damningly, bankers and their analysts, the folks who largely track, promote, and define how industries evolve didn’t even know there was an industry at all.

“Are there any public companies in the space?” they respond.

So out of curiosity, we began mapping the space itself. While we’re not bankers — we don’t need to sell our industry expertise — our short time in the industry has taught us that just because Death Care is an industry that may be hard to talk about (and has been largely overlooked by skittish analysts), it still matters, it’s still a behemoth, and it would certainly be valuable for insiders and outsiders to understand that.

The result is, from what we can tell, the first comprehensive overview of the death care industry for public consumption. Introducing, The DeathScape:

You can see a high res version of the DeathScape here.

The fine print:

• The DeathScape is categorized generally by service bucket, chronological from left to right, in the order consumers experience services.
• Technology runs across the bottom because it applies to all phases.
• The Supplier category includes both b2b and b2c.
• In some cases, company services overlap multiple categories. We did our best to generalize and represented them in the category where they most heavily focus. There are a couple exceptions where you’ll see the same logo in two categories.
• Some buckets have a market size at the bottom. These are generally accepted estimates of industry, or — in some cases — calculated by our own analysis.
• Market estimates are specific to the death care industry (I.e. florists = $5B in sympathy flowers for death care, while the total flower industry is ~$31B).

Two asks:

1. Developing an industry overview is an imperfect science. We can only make it better if we know who we missed, who has been acquired and what might be miscategorized. Reach out to us at hello@mylestoned.com if you have input for us.
2. We’d like nothing more than to continue to work on the Deathscape with an analyst at a major bank. If you’re an analyst and are interested in partnering, please reach out to us (same email as above).

As a footnote, you can see the limited resources in aftercare. We live in a social age, and communication about deceased loved ones is no longer for early adopters or millennials — it’s for anyone who has ever lost anyone. There is a huge opportunity for the industry to provide resources for families who want to continue to remember and celebrate those they’ve lost. Check out Mylestoned to learn a bit more about that.

People, if you got this far, please hit the ❤ below. An industry that ❤s together, stays together.