Lotame

Hires Machine Learning Expert, John Thomas, to Advance Use of Social Data to Improve Online Marketing Results

New York (February 2, 2010) Lotame Solutions, Inc., the market leader in understanding, interpreting, and activating social data, today announced the opening of a research and development office in Cambridge, MA to be headed by John Thomas, PhD, in the newly created position of Director of R&D.

“John Thomas is a recognized expert in machine learning and data mining,” says Jeremy Pinkham, Lotame’s CTO.  “He and his research team will advance our ongoing efforts to apply innovative techniques and algorithms to our data. Our new R&D will capitalize on the latest advances in large scale machine learning to yield superior intelligence on people and their online behavior.  The result will be enhanced returns for our customers.”

Previously, Mr. Thomas was a senior scientist at Cambridge-based Crimson Hexagon.  There, he designed, implemented, and maintained several of the core components in their VoxTrox suite of social media analytics.  Prior to joining Crimson, his research focused on modeling evolutionary constraints on protein families.  In particular, he developed algorithms to identify and encode these constraints to facilitate protein analysis, classification, and design.  He also served as a visiting Student at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

“Lotame’s underlying data assets share many of the same characteristics as protein sequence data and opinionated text.  In both cases, it is critical to identify the important features and model them in a way that can be both understood and used for prediction,” says Mr. Thomas.  “My previous research in graphical models and text classification provides a toolbox to create better models of audience behavior and deliver greater value to our clients.”

Mr. Thomas graduated from Gettysburg College with a dual degree in computer science and mathematics. He earned both his MS and PhD in computer science from Dartmouth College.

Lotame (www.lotame.com) leads the market in understanding, interpreting, and activating social data.  Lotame built CrowdControl, its social operating system, from the ground up, and today collects and organizes over 2 billion daily behaviors from more than 76 million people online. Advertisers, agencies, and publishers work with Lotame to create precise audience marketing solutions derived from superior knowledge of online human behavior.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Lotame Preferences Manager, now available at www.lotame.com/preferences.html.  As part of our ongoing commitment to consumer privacy and transparency, our preferences manager enables people to both delete and add cookie-level information, including age, gender, and interests, so that Lotame can serve them ads that better match their expressed preferences.

With the introduction of its preference manager, Lotame continues to take steps to establish and adopt responsible privacy practices.  Lotame retains the non-personal information it collects for up to nine months, and was one of the earliest companies in its industry to adopt a fixed, unqualified retention policy.  For those consumers who do opt-out, Lotame also promotes (on its opt-out confirmation page) an aggregated set of third party tools for extending and maintaining their opt-outs.

We encourage you to visit and use our preferences manager today, and look forward to your comments and feedback on our ongoing efforts to provide the best ads and most sensible privacy solutions.

The online advertising industry at large is sprinting towards maximizing efficiency. Overall, the working theory is that smart aggregation and assembly of various technology providers will create a unique solution for display advertising, and one that combines audience targeting, procurement, arbitrage and media trade. However, if, as Randall Rothenberg, CEO of IAB, states: “technology succeeds in driving the cost of reaching the perfect audience down to zero” in his latest post titled “Is Marketing a Strategic Resource or a Procured Commodity?” then the industry might be fumbling towards false ecstasy, with “the same low costs, the same perfect efficiency, for doing the same exact thing.”

Allow me to explain. With all of the aggregation and consolidation of publishers, networks, and exchanges, in many instances, an overlap occurs with publisher inventory. Think about a typical web publisher in today’s ecosystem. Think about how many ad networks that publisher works with. Now think about how many ad exchanges those ad networks work with. Then think about how many Demand Side Platforms those ad exchanges work with. The result? The tail wags the dog: when you bid on an impression, in all likely hood, you are bidding on yourself, for the same piece of inventory. This overlap and inconsistency in many cases results in decreased efficiency.

Here at Lotame we call this concept “Macrotization” wherein you try and optimize results at the macro level but have built algorithms and processes that can’t ultimately be supported by the disparate supporting systems and components. Many of the components in these new advertising platforms don’t necessarily complement each other, even though it may seem as if they do, and complementary buzzwords often connect ephemeral dots that don’t belong. In time, the foundation for macrotization will settle, but for now, tremors still abound.

The truth is, there are few companies out there that successfully manage all pieces of the “macrotization” process. Those that can will deliver true efficiencies for their clients because they can seamlessly connect and control all pieces in the value chain—from audience identification through media delivery and resulting insights—in a completely transparent manner.

Digital Marketing Veteran to Educate Market on Value of Social Data

New York (December 14, 2009) Lotame, the data-driven audience marketing platform that combines social data with audience insights to deliver greater marketing accuracy and audience engagement for brand marketers, today announced that Eric Porres has joined the fast growing company as Chief Marketing Officer.

“Eric will use his respected experience to explain, position, and demonstrate to brand marketers why social data revolutionizes their approach to online marketing,” says Andy Monfried, Lotame’s CEO to whom Mr. Porres will report.  “He will be our leading voice to pioneer an evolutionary change in understanding the value of social data and its resulting return on marketing investment for brand marketers.”

One of those value initiatives is having Lotame included in the comScore Media Metrix advertising networks report, which will provide greater visibility into its social audience segments. “We are looking forward to including Lotame as part of our ad networks report,” says Lynn Bolger, EVP of Advertising Solutions for comScore.  “As social media becomes a more integral component of digital initiatives, comScore is committed to providing the requisite digital market intelligence required to understand the reach and behavioral profile of important audience segments.”

Mr. Porres was a founding partner of Underscore Marketing, a fully independent, full-service digital media agency launched in 2002.  He helped build the team into a recognized Inc 5000 company and expand its presence internationally.  Mr. Porres is also one of the founders of Pericles Consulting, an online political marketing firm that developed and executed online marketing programs for Presidential and Senatorial campaigns across the country.  Earlier in his career, Mr. Porres held management positions at AOL Time Warner, Agency.com, and LiveTechnology, and as a partner with Outrageous Media produced two of the largest Internet webcasts in history, Michael Jackson´s “What More Can I Give” concert in Munich, Germany in 1999 and Paul McCartney´s “Run Devil Run” concert in Liverpool, England in 2000.

For two years Mr. Porres served on the board of 212, New York’s Interactive Advertising Club, most recently as its Vice-President.  He is an active investor and advisor to several start-up companies and a frequent panelist and moderator at leading industry events. Mr. Porres graduated from Duke University.

“Lotame built an excellent reputation in social media, and with almost two billion daily points of social data rendered in our taxonomy of human behavior, it’s a great foundation for our path forward,” says Mr. Porres.  “For marketers, we are able to answer fundamental questions like: “Did I reach my intended audience?; Did that audience engage?; Did I have brand impact?; Do I have a model of engagement that makes sense?; and Do I have insights into what my audience does online beyond content consumption?’ Aided by our technology and publisher partnerships, we will deliver against these objectives.”

In addition to his responsibilities as Chief Marketing Officer, Mr. Porres will lead Lotame’s brand research and insights initiatives.

Lotame integrates anonymous social media activity data (such as blogging, uploading, posting and sharing) with intent, interest and demographic data in order to generate actionable marketing insights and waste-free audience delivery.  This cumulative effect results in stronger consumer engagement and better campaign results for its brand, agency and publishing partners.  The privately-held Maryland and New York-based company is backed by funding from Battery Ventures, Emergence Capital Partners, Betaworks and Hillcrest Management.

The world will never be the same. Our society used to build machines and parts, in factories and in assembly lines. Today, our society builds computer programs and data bases, on laptops and in many cases, from anywhere around the world. People and businesses are becoming more efficient. They are working smarter, not harder, because they are beginning to leverage the most valuable employee of all: Data.

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Take for example the airline industry. Consider all those times you got bumped off of a flight, rescheduled, canceled, or offered money to take a different flight. We’ve all been there and it always happens for a reason. This reason is that airlines try to prevent the loss of business and in doing so, they look at dozens of consumer driven behaviors such as how long you travel for, how many weekend flights you take, how many return flights you take, how many flights you take during the week, if you are a frequent flier, and the list goes on. All of these individual data points are used to inform a business decision. The decision is objective. The decision is data driven.

But what happens when we can make decisions using even more data points? Much more data points? Literally, hundreds of thousands if not millions of data points, and did I mention, in real time?

Welcome to the Data Renaissance. Thanks to increasingly efficient and scalable technologies like solid state drives, mobile devices, and cloud computing, the possibilities of data analysis are endless. I mean, just think about how much time we either spend online or connected to a mobile device. This has tremendous implications from travel, health and fitness, to finance, education, and media and the best part is, we haven’t even scratched the surface.

Like I said before, the implications here are huge. Many companies recognize the need to have these comprehensive data sets while having ways of analyzing that data. The digital media and online advertising industry in particular are both in a unique place since their very foundations are dependent upon these high growth technologies; digital devices and the Internet. In this space, companies are racing to a holy grail of advertising where they can leverage millions of individual consumer behaviors to inform brand engagement opportunities and purchasing decisions. Unlike the airline industry, online advertisers can leverage millions of data points instead of those “dozen,” and if done correctly, the consumer experience will be better than it’s ever been before. Everything will matter. Everything will be relevant. We will all become more enlightened and informed to things that interest the most because these new technologies are launching us into the very early, but still uncharted, data renaissance.