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.

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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.

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.

I posted a video, of 13 of the most influential leaders in the digital space. I ask each of them the same question, “What is your perspective on what the next 6-12 months will bring for digital marketing.” There are lots of well thought out and varied opinions, but three trends seem to be on the minds of all of these people; Social, Data, and Cross Medium Marketing (using TV, Radio, Out of home, and Digital together.) Lotame’s capabilities in both the Social and Data realms are very strong, and those capabilities will lead to a very strong foundation for cross medium marketing in the future.

The response to the video was overwhelming, so I thought that I would share it on Lotame Learnings. Enjoy

Big thanks to all those who participated in my ad hoc video, John Nardone - CEO of [x+1], Jeff Hirsch - CEO of Audience Science, Adam Broitman - founder A Media Circ.us, Eric Porres & Tom Hespos - founders of Underscore Marketing, David Berkowitz - 360i, Ben Barokas - Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer - Admeld, Raj Chauhan - VP, Ad Network Development - Rubicon Project, Michael Burke - Co-Founder & President - Appssavvy ,Tim McHale - The Madison Avenue Journal, Steven Kaufman - EVP, Client Service - MediaMath, David Honing - Co-Founder - media6, and Janet Balis - President - Digital Media Strategies

Listen to our weekly conversation about Online Media over at Blog Talk Radio. This week we spoke with Jerry Shereshewsky, CEO, Grandparents.com. Jerry may be the only marketing executive in the burgeoning digital technology field who’s invented a new brand of soda pop. Then again, he has been associated with breakthrough marketing ideas in every phase of his distinguished career.

Jerry & I spoke for about 45 minutes (he was about 15 minutes late) and we both shared some great information about how important Grandparents are to a marketer, how Grandparents behave in social media, and Jerry offered us a case study that proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that branding efforts online work! To everyone who doesn’t know Jerry, his style is fun!

Listen to Jerry and I here:

For a complete listing of all the archived shows please visit our newly minted Online Media Remix Radio Show archive page.

Upcoming Shows: 4/16 Dan Beltrano, CEO of VIzu, 4/23 Steve Polsky CEO of Flixster, 4/30 Mark RedGrave CEO of Amplify, Natural Language Processing technology

On Thursday 3/5/09, we had a great discussion with Ian Schafer the CEO of the award winning ad agency Deep Focus. Ian is a leading voice in the online advertising industry, and a proponent for using digital media (and social media) to get the word out about their clients.

Listen to the Radio Show here:

During the show we took a bunch of questions from the Social Media Funky Bunch in the chat room. It was great one!

Upcoming shows include

Adam Hirsch, COO of Mashable (Thursday 3/26 @11:30EST)

If you are interested in being a guest on the show, please eMail me at Scott@lotame.com, our schedule books up quickly so let me know right away.