Industry veteran Nick Morley has been appointed as Manchester adtech Lunio’s new CEO, tasked with continuing the company’s growth and expanding its geographical footprint.
Morley (pictured, left), who has experience of leading go-to-market strategies at the likes of Adobe, Efficient Frontier and Integral Ad Science, has served as Lunio’s board chair since March. He now takes over executive leadership of the Manchester-based martech scale-up, while founder Neil Andrew (right) moves into a new role as chief strategy officer.
Morley said: “I was attracted to Lunio because it is directly tackling an increasingly painful and costly problem for businesses. Across all sectors, invalid traffic rates are on the rise, costing organisations vast amounts of money in wasted ad spend and lost revenue. The needs of performance marketers are being neglected with the shift towards black box campaign types which strip out control and transparency.
“We have a huge opportunity to fill the void in the market, helping advertisers to increase the quality of their digital ad traffic and accelerate growth across their marketing channels. Beyond this, we’re developing a compelling vision for Lunio to become the go-to partner for performance marketers, through ongoing product development and strategic partnerships.”
With average rates of invalid traffic now exceeding 8.5%, businesses are wasting up to $71bn in ad spend globally. They are also missing out on revenue that would have been generated had this budget been spent on high quality traffic. For a company spending $1M with a 3:1 return on ad spend, a 5% invalid traffic rate equates to $50,000 in annual wasted ad spend, plus another $150,000 in missed revenue.
Lunio enables performance marketers to regain control, detecting invalid traffic, reducing wasted ad spend and driving better targeting and engagement with genuine prospects.
Before joining Lunio, Morley served as EVP International at Alida. Prior to that, he spent five years leading the European arm of Integral Ad Science through an extended period of hypergrowth, culminating in its 2021 IPO (nasdaq:IAS). Between 2006 – 2011, Morley established the international business of Efficient Frontier and led the company through its successful $400M sale and integration into Adobe Marketing Cloud.
In September 2022, Lunio raised $15 million in Series A funding, backed by Smedvig Capital, Praetura Ventures, and an Angel fund of senior leaders in the AdTech space at companies such as Google and Warner.
Joe Knowles at Smedvig Capital said of the new appointment: “Nick has a formidable track record in accelerating growth within scale-ups in the marketing technology industry. We’re excited to support Nick, Neil and the team at Lunio as they continue to build momentum in the market and exploit new opportunities for growth.”
Colin Greene, Partner at Praetura Ventures, added: “We’ve seen the value that Nick has brought to Lunio as chair this year and now he can deliver even greater impact as CEO. Nick has laid out an ambitious vision for Lunio over the coming years – tapping into an urgent need amongst advertisers – and we’re excited to support him in achieving it.”
Morley concluded: “Since becoming chair, I’ve been incredibly impressed by the creativity and commitment of the entire team at Lunio, and I’m looking forward to working closely with our talented management team on the next stage of Lunio’s journey. I’m also delighted that Neil Andrew will continue as chief strategy officer – tapping into his knowledge and experience will be a huge asset.
“We’ll continue to be driven by the needs of our customers, ensuring that our solutions help advertisers to consistently drive more value from their performance marketing budgets.”
