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:

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. 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. 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: