You may have noticed some new videos on our homepage. We had a lot of fun creating them and felt it would be a great opportunity for all of you to get a glimpse inside Lotame to see what we are up to. In addition to our new homepage we have re-skinned our YouTube Channel and will be uploading all of our new content there as well.
Stay Tuned!
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The Lotame blog has been quiet for a while. And for those of you who know our company, quiet is not exactly our style. But we’ve been hard at work and have much to share.
RICH MEDIA BENCHMARKING RESEARCH YIELDS NEW INSIGHTS.
Most recently we released data that validates what we’ve known for quite a while. Measurement of more than 100 ad campaigns and billions of ad impressions confirms that users in a social media environment interact with rich media at a much higher rate than when displaying that same rich media in a non-social context.
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE: LOTAME HAS OFFICIALLY MADE HISTORY!
You heard correctly. Our ability to target consumers using the anonymous social data layer has officially been entered into the annals of interactive advertising history as documented by a recent Fast Company article. The author had a chance to sit down and speak at length with Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame, who shared his perspective, including:
“They email, they blog, they comment, they post, they share, they link, they upload, they friend, they stream, they write on a wall, they update a profile. There are 160 verbs that we currently track.” Andy is referring to our ability to find consumers in an entirely new way; a way that enables us to message with more precise relevance than ever before through our proprietary “verb targeting” technology.
AND THERE’S BEEN SOME EXCITING NEWS FOR FORD. 
Lotame has been working with the talented Hamerlin Media on a Ford initiative. Together we managed to throw some pretty impressive statistics on the board (as covered in Mediapost), including:
“From January through July, Lotame — which provides behavioral targeting and Web analytics for marketers — delivered better average click-through rates and interaction rates with the ad. In fact, the campaign beat the average click-through rate by nearly 15%, outperforming in click interaction by 88% and delivering a 216% improvement compared with the average action yield. During this campaign, people who saw the ads were 20% more likely to buy a Ford vehicle during the next six months than a controlled group who had not.”
These are important insights for Ford, and Hamerlin deserves big kudos for bringing new thinking to their client.
RACHEL GLICKMAN GOES BEYOND AGE AND GENDER.
Our very own Rachel Glickman, SVP of Publisher Development, took time to share some ink with Mediapost this month. Apparently, Rachel stirred up some controversy in the comments section of her post; but that is what we love about her. Rachel does not settle for the status quo (I think that is what our publishers love about her as well).
We hope you’ve all had as interesting and productive a summer as we’ve had in LotaLand. Look out for more frequent updates from us on what’s happening in our world and new and noteworthy developments across the industry.
Dan Reich, one of Lotame’s business development team, just published a thought provoking piece on how marketers can effectively use online video platform, like YouTube. I really like his comparisons between the Media Dictatorships of yesteryear and Media Democracy of today. In Dan’s own words:
We used to live in what I will call a Media Dictatorship. A Media Dictatorship is a world where content is created by a few dictators (media companies), and as a result, those few dictators are able to charge a premium to advertisers for access to the eyeballs and ears of the people watching that premium content. This process is called television, radio, print, magazines, and newspapers. Think about the Super Bowl and Super Bowl commercials for a second. One night a year, content providers or dictators (the cable network hosting the Super Bowl) know that they will have an entire country watching their show, and as a result, they are able to charge a fortune to advertisers for a 30 second commercial. According to the Associated Press, a 30 second spot for the 2008 Super Bowl was $2.7M dollars. On this night, everyone knows that millions of eyeballs and ears will be tuned in, and so, advertisers are willing to shell out some big bucks for the opportunity to reach all of those viewers (according to a Nielsen report, there were 97.5M viewers of the 2008 Super Bowl). In this world, the world of a Media Dictatorship, the dictators own the distribution of the content, and therefore they own your attention.
Today we live in a very different world. A world that I will call a Media Democracy. A Media Democracy is a world where content is created by anyone, and as a result, those people are able to charge whatever they would like. However in this world, in this Media Democracy, the people that own the distribution do not force their content on the people (see Google). These distribution owners let the people choose what they watch or listen to and as a result, attention isn’t owned but earned. In order to accrue lots of eyeballs and ears, the content must be compelling and the people must be willing to share. And unless there are lots of eyeballs, it is very difficult for the people to charge advertisers anything at all. Consider that YouTube video that you loved, but only has about 100 views. Although the content may be awesome, 100 views is of little significance to big brand advertisers. Now consider that YouTube video that your friend told you about. The video that you would of never heard of had that friend not said anything to you. Turns out, this video has 100M views. Guess who made money off of this video? No one. There was no $2.7M commercial for 30 seconds. The video itself was only 55 seconds, and yet for 55 seconds, this video had the attention of almost 100M viewers. This was a mini Super Bowl event that happened organically, grew virally, and was controlled by no one. A true democracy.
Welcome to the new age of the internet. Open, distributed, democratized. More specifically, welcome to YouTube. At any given point in time a video could experience a Super Bowl-like event or what I rather refer to as a Black Swan event.
When you openly start to compare actual numbers of video views to survey based results for television shows, you start to see that there are examples of Super Bowls events happening on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis…on all different parts of the web.
Read the rest of Dan’s blog post which can be found here.
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I was just blown away by this statistic published by Andreas Weigend, over at the Harvard Business Blog.
He states that “In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008. Information overload is more serious than ever.” WOW
Andreas should know, he is the former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com and an expert in data mining and computational marketing. He currently teaches the graduate course Data Mining and Electronic Commerce at Stanford University.
He goes on to explain that we are in the midst of a second data revolution. “The second data revolution brought about a new dimension to data creation: users started to actively contribute explicit data such as information about themselves, their friends, or about the items they purchased. These data went far beyond the click-and-search data that characterized the first decade of the web.”
At Lotame, we are at the epicenter of this revolution, our core DNA is about turning these mountains of data (all different kinds) into value for publishers, marketers, and consumers. All our technology offerings, have been built with Andreas’ vision of the second data revolution in mind. If you haven’t had the opportunity to see our suite of products first hand, then you are missing out on a presentation that will have you thinking about the possibilities of using Lotame in daily lives.
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In the coming weeks I will be writing about how too much money is spent on Television advertising and not enough is spent on Internet Marketing. I will make direct comparisons about how marketing on the internet is more effective, accountable, targetable, and immersive. The internet can now deliver full motion audio and video marketing and advertising, a domain once held exclusively by television, thanks to an overwhelming penetration of broadband. It time to start thinking outside of the :30 second box…I hope that I can convince a few of you too.
UPDATE (5/28/09) The video described below was removed from YouTube “by the user” but the gang over at TV by the Numbers captured some of the stand-up by Jimmy Kimmel at the ABC upfront. As they describe in their post title “Jimmy Kimmel Speaks the Truth at ABC Upfront Meeting”
Mr. Kimmel came out and told viewers, “Everything you’re going to hear this week is bullshit…”
And the new shows? “We’re going to cancel about 90% of them,” he said. “Everyone is full of shit except Mike Shaw.”
Mr. Kimmel noted that ABC wanted Jay Leno in its late-night lineup, but that NBC decided to retain Mr. Leno “even if we have to destroy our own network to do it.”
He joked that NBC will offer the TV equivalent of early-bird specials, running its late-night show at 10 p.m. and announcing its primetime schedule before the other networks.
“I don’t know if they’re two weeks early or 50 weeks late,” he said.
Mr. Kimmel said ABC would be offering advertisers great brand integration opportunities. “If you pay enough, your product can kill Dr. Izzie on ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’” he joked.
And as for affluent audiences, he said, 10% of ABC viewers are “watching from homes they still own.”
Ad buyers don’t need an upfront, he said. They need therapy.
“Who cares? It’s not your money. Just give it to us,” he said.
The story has gone wide, with even the NY Times reporting on the event. In the meantime watch Jimmy Kimmel in this years ABC network upfront presentation take a hilarious and satirical look at the state of the media buyers relationship with the television networks.
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