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.

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.

Yesterday Adotas wrote:

In a bleak advertising landscape, with brands and agencies looking to capture more dollars from their data by creating their own ad networks, third-party players might be the ones that will be either squeezed or shut out entirely.

Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame, spoke to Ed Barrera, editor of Adotas at a Digiday conference, said there are also opportunities for those who open up their technology.

Here is the video courtesy of Adotas:

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Yesterday, June 9th, Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame, appeared on Stage with at the Digiday conference in NYC. He was part of a panel entitled “The Next Generation Ad Network:” which was moderated by Adam Broitman of the ad agency Circus (that is Circ.us) In a room full of people who were largely talking in high concepts around data, targeting, and revenue optimization, there was a real moment of clarity that came from Andy. Here is the quote, as re-told by Jason Heller, one of the conference organizers, who was twittering live:

I thought that this was a great quote. Here is the way that I interpreted the quote: “The future of advertising isn’t traditional or digitial, it is about communicating with people in various points of their daily lives, no matter what the medium.”

Andy Monfried spoke at an EconAffinity Panel. Excerpt and video below:

—Horse and buggy: Monfried practically leapt out of his chair to respond: “Technology has lifted CPMs. This argument was heard a 100 years ago by horse and buggy operators: ‘Hey, we have all these horses that run great, ignore Henry Ford.’ A 14-year-old kid does not want to stay on your website; he wants to pull your content to his. And behavioral targeting can help you make money on that.”  OPA’s Horan shook her head: But only 1 percent of revenues are from BT (NYSE: BT). We should be focusing on the question is what sort of environment your ad is in. Monfried shot back again: “That’s been the NYT‘s argument for years. There’s so much they could have done. They could have benefited from microchucking. It was then Millard’s turn to interject: “Is that a word, microchunking?”