Lotame

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.

Here are a quick 5 reasons why you should build a Facebook Fan Page:

1) Reach over 200,000,000 users

According to Mashable, “Twitter and Facebook Post Huge Growth Numbers in March,” Facebook grows about 23% every month and just below 200% in one year. Your Fan Page will continue to gain exposure to more and more users as time goes on.

2) Instantly send news updates regarding your company/industry

With the click of a button, your updates will be posted to the infamous Facebook “minifeed” for everyone to see. Besides the “minifeed,” the news can be sent directly to your fans alerting them that you have updated information.

3) Make your company more social with photos and videos

Clients want to be comfortable working with you. The photos and videos will allow them to get to know your company easily enabling them to put a face to the voice.

4) People who are not on Facebook can still find your Fan Page through online searches

This is a huge benefit to the Fan Page. For those few online users who do not have a Facebook account, they can still read all of the information on the Fan Page.  People who do not have an account will not have the ability to receive updates.

5) For consumer goods, you can upload coupons or other types of discounts to those who are only a Fan of your company, potentially increasing your following

This can be a tool to reward those customers who engage in your product and decide to follow your company. It can be as small as a weekly discount to a chance to win prizes. This benefit is only for those Facebook users that are your fans.

The Facebook fan page is a free and helpful tool for every company, regardless of your industry. It will increase your reach allowing you to instantly alert your fans of important information. Make your Fan page today. If you have found any other reasons to make a Fan, please share them in the comments section.

This paper was originally created to share our continued understanding of how powerful Social Media is as a Marketing, Branding, Advertising, PR tool. The case in hand was some work we did for a big peanut butter brand with respects to education around the Salmonella outbreak earlier this year, but timing sometimes is everything. We “unofficially” released this white paper on Monday 4/23/2009 and the following day Domino’s Pizza had it’s own Social Media PR nightmare on it’s hands (which I thought they handled very well.) NY Times reporter, Stephanie Clifford quickly got on the phone with me, and Lotame ended up providing background comments on “Video Prank at Domino’s Taints Brand” that ran in the the Media and Advertising Section of last Thursday print edition.

Here is the White Paper that got us into the NY Times, pretty powerful findings and recommendations:

Successfully Using Social Media for Crisis Management eDoc

It is no secret that the ad economy is currently weak. Even the rosiest of estimates have paired back general ad spending, from anywhere to up a small % year over year to down. There is no question that as we head into the 2nd Quarter of 2009, CPM rates will continue to come under pressure.

Premium content sites have begun to surface some evidence on their strategy on how to weather the storm, by introducing “paid for” services. In the last 24 hours, The Wall Street Journal announced their Niche content subscription plans, and the Washington Post announced their “paid for” image service. There is precedent for this corporate behavior, this very same cycle (ad market collapse / increase in paid services) happened in back in the 1999-2000.

But what are sites doing that don’t have a premium offering that is compelling enough to bundle into a “paid for” service?

These are the advertising revenue pure play sites, which represent the vast majority of web publishers today. This is especially true within the social media/community/blogger category.

It is widely believed that these pure play sites are coping by simply adding more advertising placements and ad inventory. Short term, the net effect is that if you add an ad placement, you can generate extra revenue against that page/site. The formula is quite simple, let’s say a site had two placements before the downturn which dropped their CPM’s by 33%, without any traffic growth by adding a 3rd ad placement the site could generate 33% more revenue (than just allowing for 2 ad placements) which would equalize the raw ad revenue generation that the site delivers. Seems simple right? Not exactly.

If every site simply added an additional ad placement, the pool of available inventory would grow and the laws of supply and demand would take hold and CPM pressure would drive rates down, hypothetically by the same % that supply increased. The ad revenue flowing into the online ad economy is a constant in the equation.

So what is the answer? TIME

The answer is for publishers is to look at the value of the ad placements in terms of time that the ad was exposed to a consumer. We released some great data about the average exposure time of three of the most popular ad placements; the rectangle, the skyscraper, and the leaderboard. The results of the study showed that the rectangle sized ad had a clear advantage staying visible on a consumers screen for 13 seconds, 2.5 times more than leaderboards (5.4 seconds), and 6.8 times more than skyscrappers (1.9 Seconds).

From a marketers perspective, these are big findings. If the basic premise of online marketing is to drive brand imagery, create consumer demand, and propel purchase intent, then the ad that stays visible for longer in front of a consumer is more valuable.

If  a publisher were to plan ad placements based on the data that we released, then theoretically a publisher might actually be able to reduce the number of ads served on a page, and get an increased effectiveness of the ones that remained. To illustrate, if a web site currently has an equal mix of rectangle, skyscrapper, and leaderboard ads on every page, and they move to two rectangle ads, the time that those two ads would be visible to a consumer would be 26 seconds, up 28% from 20.3 total exposure seconds with the current three ad placements per page.

By looking at the time spent metrics, a publisher can drive value for marketers (and marketers will reward publishers with higher CPMs), remove clutter from current web page designs, and drive greater and more efficient revenue. It is a win, win, win, scenario.

If you are a publisher that would like to understand more about what Lotame does, and how we can help you grow your revenue in a smart way email me at scott@lotame.com

In Social Media Marketing campaigns a common goal is to achieve a higher “Word of Mouth” quotient. Simple put, an ideal use of media and marketing inside a community is to get people talking about your product. Lotame’s own business intelligence unit has some new evidence about how to effect the results positively if your goal is “Word of Mouth”:

A survey conducted in tandem with a campaign targeting a teen audience showed that teen “influencers” (those users who exhibit behaviors around content production, posting, uploading, commenting, etc) who were exposed to ads were 20.7% more likely to generate buzz for the show than users who had never seen the ads. When we narrowed that down to just users who reported chatting, commenting, or sending an article about the series, we found that those users were 49.3% more likely to generate buzz for the show than users who had never seen the ads.

What does this mean for marketers? By concentrating on locating and targeting media to those people who present themselves with activities indicative of  influencing the community is an important step to seeding the conversations with your brand message.

We are looking forward to more data from our business intelligence group, that will reveal new tactics on how these “influencers” behave and how to talk with them.