Lotame

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.

Image via Wikipedia

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.

With all of the latest advances in digital media, we are still in the infancy stage when it comes to data intelligence and informative decision making. Consider what is currently happening in the display advertising space. Data and media are continuing to diverge as two separate commodities. On one hand there are data exchanges making cookie files or user information available for purchase. On the other hand, there are media exchanges that make media available for purchase letting businesses use primary or secondary cookie files from other sources to make the ad decision.

This new divergence between data and media, coupled with the notion that bigger is better when it comes to data, makes for an interesting dynamic in today’s industry. Companies are looking to build their own, large cookie pools. In some cases, these are companies with no real technology or mathematical expertise. The natural assumption is that by having large data sets, it would allow for informative ad decision making and that assumption is absolutely warranted. But again, we are only in the infancy stage when it comes to data intelligence and information decision making so it is important to understand all layers involved while pursuing the “data” path.

There is an entire meta-layer between data and media, and that layer is around delivery and optimization. It’s the ability to marry delivery, performance, and backend metrics with data collection and custom audiences. Without this connection, data is meaningless. Imagine for a second you spent $5,000 on the latest and greatest Flat Screen High Definition TV, $600 on the latest Blue Ray DVD drive, but decided to use old audio/video composite cables instead of investing the extra $150 on some good HDMI cables. Your investments in the television and the Blue Ray drive aren’t even close to maximized unless an additional investment is made in the “connection.”

This is unquestionably one of the most important, yet most overlooked aspects of today’s ecosystem. Data is only as valuable as the intelligence or “connection” behind it. In the coming months, the companies that are positioned to efficiently collect and segment data and, more importantly, are able to tie that data in a meaningful way to media through enhanced delivery and optimization techniques, will see an increase in sales, margins, and ROI. By valuing audiences and media separately, there is also a new arbitrage opportunity available to those that truly understand the three aspects of data, media, and delivery.

At the end of the day, companies will need to make smart investments on technology vendors and third party solutions in order to help achieve their goals. As the economy continues to shake out, as costs and expenses continue to be cut, and as resources continue to be reallocated, it is all that more critical for companies to make sound investments that contribute to increased efficiency and productivity. In order to do this, companies will continue to turn towards “data” in order to make informative decisions, to both business and literal ad serving.

Lotame Goes Beyond Targeting

When we started Lotame a few years ago, our objective was to help publishers, agencies and marketers make sense of a seismic shift that was taking place in the way that all of us consume media. No longer were we passive consumers, merely being entertained by content—advances in technology (as well as other factors) made it so that we WERE the content.

This was an eye opening time for me and the rest of my founding team at Lotame.

We went to market with our proprietary technology, Crowd Control.

The idea was that we would revolutionize the ad network model by adding a layer of “social data” (this is how we refer to the data garnered from the various behaviors we anonymously track in social networks) on top of current audience segmentation models.

Our approach proved to be very successful.

As we were serving billions of impressions for our clients and partners we realized something; many of the advertisers that we worked with were just as interested in the data coming out of campaigns, as the clicks that were coming from the campaigns.

This was an “ah-ha” moment for me, and over time Lotame began to expand its offerings beyond what we had originally set out to do. My gut was telling me, the more value we can provide for our clients, the more we can move beyond what anyone else was doing in the space.

The more agencies and publishers became enamored with our ability help them learn about their audience, the more we sought to provide tools to help them do so. We even went to so far as to form strategic partnerships with various companies that could provide deeper insights for our clients. On a parallel path, we begin to partner with rich media vendors that could help our clients provide unique experiences within social networks. In no way were we gunning to becoming a creative shop; we just wanted to provide our clients with whatever it took to achieve success.

I began to the see the nature of our company shaping up to look something like this:

Lotame was becoming a true platform for agencies, publishers and marketers. A platform that went beyond what our competitors were currently doing. We felt we kept going beyond what the industry expected from a company that once focused on targeting audiences in social spaces. The word “beyond” seemed to come up so often in reference to the way we worked, we decided to make it our war cry, “Beyond Targeting”.

Since we introduced the notion of Beyond Targeting, people have been asking me what it means — and I have to be honest; Due to my improvisational nature (hat tip to Jerome Garcia) I found myself responding differently to the question each time – “What is BEYOND TARGETING after all?”

The fact is, we started as a company that focused on one thing — and managed to put together a team with so much heart, and so much talent — that we always seem to go beyond what is expected.

*We went beyond targeting by providing clients actionable consumer insights.

*We went beyond targeting when we decided to help our clients deliver appropriate messages in social spaces.

*We went beyond targeting when we created a platform that allows our agency partners to build custom audiences.

So long as I am at the helm of this company, going beyond the expectations of our clients - will be the rule, not the exception.

It is true that Lotame is a company rooted in technology but we have grown to be so much more. We have grown into an advertising platform, a trusted partner for publishers, and an extension of both agency and marketing teams.

Our ability to go beyond is what really makes Lotame successful. I would like to thank my team, my family, and all of our wonderful partners and clients—we could not have gone beyond targeting without you.

Our mission statement at Lotame is quite simple.

“To continuously challenge the conventional wisdom of the world of advertising (catalyzing it’s evolution) through technology, innovation, creativity, and PASSION.”

Rock on.

Andy Monfried

At Lotame, we are constantly striving to stay ahead of the curve and innovate. Since our inception, we have aggressively sought out and developed new, valuable metrics to measure the success of individual online advertising campaigns, as we do not believe (and have never believed) that clicks and conversions tell the complete story.

After much exploration, research, and analysis over the past few years, we have also realized there is no “magic metric”. In other words, there is not one individual metric that has the capability of measuring success for all campaigns. A key reason for this is due to each advertiser or campaign having a different goal. Some advertisers just want users to become familiar with their brand; others want users to purchase their product; while others want users to watch their television show or movie. One metric cannot accurately accomplish measuring each of these goals at the same time.

A year ago, we created our own single, unified metric for every campaign. It was a combination of every metric we look at in measuring the success of the campaign. However, there was an issue with creating such a metric – how does an advertiser compare the performance of their campaign by media buy/site? If only one buy/site uses the metric, then you cannot compare it across all buys/sites. Since the metrics we use incorporate our technology, it is not always easy to reproduce for other buys.

As a result, we measure the performance for each campaign individually, which also allows us to customize what we measure and report on for each campaign/advertiser. At Lotame, we have always prided ourselves on being 100% customizable for advertisers. We create completely customizable targets – no buckets. Therefore, creating completely customizable performance measurements seemed like a natural progression. While there are typically only a few possible end goals of a campaign (awareness, conversions/purchases/intent to buy, intent to view, buzz generation), many advertisers have smaller, intermediate goals. These smaller goals are fairly unique to each campaign. Therefore, we measure each of these goals as well as analyze the other metrics we deem to be valuable for their end goal. We want to stress that the smaller goals only exist as a means to measure the larger, end goals. And that is where our knowledge and experience at measuring the end goals comes into play. For instance, an advertiser may run a campaign asking users to upload photos for a contest. The likely reason behind running such a campaign is to generate awareness of the product/brand. We will not only measure the performance of the contest entries, but also various other metrics (i.e. Lotame’s patented Time Spent metric, the amount of time a user spends on the micro-site and/or the number of pages consumed on the micro-site, the responses to one-question in-banner surveys, and various engagement metrics with the creative) to get a more complete picture of awareness. The advertiser should understand that their contest is only one small portion of measuring the awareness of their product/brand. Lotame will complete the story with our knowledge, technology, and customized performance metrics.

We will continue to strive to identify and evangelize the best metrics possible to enable our clients to set appropriate goals for their campaigns and gain optimal insight into campaign performance. In doing so, we may find our way back to some uber-metrics, entirely new metrics or most likely, combinations of metrics which can be customized to match the specific requirements of each campaign. We’re fortunate to have great partners in this quest – our forward-thinking brand, agency, and publishing partners and companies including Vizu and Dimestore. Ultimately, the continuous development of new and scalable metrics will provide our clients with the best approaches for guiding and measuring their online advertising campaigns.

Written by: Doug Pollack is a Senior Business Analyst with Lotame Solutions. Doug has been responsible for the development of leading, and innovative Key Performance Indicators as well as new metrics for digital media. Prior to Lotame, Doug worked for a division of the Army where he leveraged his statistics background to analyze the aging of tanks operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doug is available at doug [at] lotame [dot] com.

one-question in-banner surveys: Surveys have gotten a bad reputation recently – mainly due to poor response rates and inaccurate results. However, the surveys we run are not affected by these issues. The types of surveys that are affected are the long surveys that force users to stray away from the website they were on. Users, especially those on social community sites (like Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo), do not want to be taken away from the websites they are on. These long, in-depth surveys do just that. They take the user away from the sites for a very long time, as they typically have 10 to 20 pages of questions. Therefore, the response and completion rates of the surveys are quite poor, leading to limited responses. With limited responses, results are typically inaccurate. However, the quick, in-banner, one question surveys we run solve these problems. Users can quickly take the survey without leaving their community. This leads to higher response rates, more responses, and more accurate results. In fact, Lotame has just finished a study testing the accuracy of the results of the surveys. We ran a survey measuring intent to view, which asked users if they planned on watching the season premiere of a popular TV show. We then re-surveyed the users who responded with a 2nd survey asking if they actually watched the premiere. 83.3% of users who responded to the 1st survey saying they would “Definitely” watch the premiere, did tune-in and watch the premiere. 74% of users who responded to the first survey saying they would either “Probably” or “Definitely” watch the premiere, did tune-in to the premiere.

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:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Internet Advertising Numbers Not Promising (mediabistro.com)
• Users spend more time viewing Medium Rectangle Ads. So what? (earnblogger.com)
• @ EconAffinity: Publishers Debate: Not Enough Scarcity Or Not Enough Technology? (paidcontent.org)
• Amplify Aids Social Media Monetization with Semantic Technology (beet.tv)