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A Bit of Good News on Lotame

A bit of good news from our team........Andy

Lotame Reaches 52 Million U.S. Users Within Social Media; U.S. Reach Now Larger Than Facebook

June 23, 2008, 8:00 AM

NEW YORK, June 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Lotame Solutions, Inc., a leader in online advertising within social media, announced today that it now reaches over 52 million U.S. users across dozens of social networks. The company has also been accepted as a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), an organization comprised of leading interactive companies in the online arena.

"Lotame is proud that our partners have both increased performance and maximized returns from social media," said Andrew Monfried, Founder & CEO. "Giving brands the opportunity to develop and target their own customizable audiences differentiates us, and the fact that we are now a member of the IAB demonstrates our value."

"We've recently partnered with Lotame because they look at social media in a whole new way," said Steve Polsky, President and COO of Flixster, the leading social community focused on movies. "Their ability to target interest groups across social media has the potential to deliver increased engagement for brand advertisers, better advertising for users, and increased monetization for sites such as Flixster. We're excited about their offering."

"Innovators like Lotame are making social media inventory even more valuable," said Andrew Cohen, General Manager of Fotolog, the global photo blogging community. "And working with Lotame has increased our exposure with major brand advertisers in the United States."

In just over 18 months, the company has managed to outpace Facebook in the U.S., according to the independent web measurement company Quantcast. The company's rapid growth is based on its approach to social networking sites. Its business model is to aggregate the mid-tail of social media independent of MySpace and Facebook. "There are hundreds of social sites that have a tremendous user-base," said Scott Hoffman, Lotame's Chief Revenue Officer. "We give brands a new and compelling way to reach users inside of social media and community platforms."

"Lotame's monetization techniques work so well because of their targeting capabilities," said Joel Smernoff, President and COO of Paltalk, the premiere online video-based chat community. "A brand can build and target their own audience, which gives Paltalk's four million active users only the most relevant ads, all of which translates into higher CPMs."

Lotame's Crowd Control Technology examines user-actions such as uploading, blogging, and commenting, and then layers this data with interests such as finance, sports, and entertainment. The formula then factors in multiple data points including age, gender, recency and frequency, all of which are completely anonymous. The end result is the most robust user profiles available which allows brands to directly target their message to engaged consumers, and not simply web pages.

"Lotame has been able to provide us with intelligence about our users that we have not seen from other sources," said Derek Van Stratten, VP at the Huffington Post, one of the largest and most prominent online political forums.

"Lotame puts data at our fingertips that would normally require expensive analytics software," said Michael Lehman, VP Marketing at Meez, a leading online entertainment social network. "It's great added value."

In order to accommodate its rapid growth, the Maryland-based company has opened sales offices in New York, and added over 20 new employees to its team, including 10 new sales representatives. Last month, Lotame also built a state of the art data center to expand its technology division.

"The Lotame team is hands down the most efficient in monetizing social media. They have created an extremely innovative media company with quality people and amazing analytical tools," said Hart Cunningham, Founder & CEO of Perfspot.

"Lotame gives us access to specific custom audiences for our clients," said Darren Herman, Head of Digital Media at The Media Kitchen. "This level of targeting will become the standard in the near future as our clients demand the best."

Lotame Solutions, Inc. Founder & CEO, Andrew Monfried, will speak on a panel entitled, "Behavioral Targeting: How to Connect with the Right People in Social Media," at the OMMA Social Conference being held at The Yale Club in New York on Monday, June 23.

About Lotame:

Lotame is a company dedicated to providing solutions within social media. Our patented Crowd Control Technology offers social networks the most advanced monetization techniques, and allows brands to build and target customizable consumer audiences. We aim to increase revenue for our publisher partners and give advertisers the opportunity to target over 52 million users across multiple social networking sites. Please visit www.lotame.com for more information.

About the IAB:

Founded in 1996, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (www.iab.net) represents over 375 leading interactive companies that actively engage in and support the sale of interactive advertising. IAB members are responsible for selling over 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the continuing growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive's share of total marketing spend, and of its members' share of total marketing spend. The IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices, fields interactive effectiveness research, and educates marketers, agencies, and media companies, as well as the wider business community, about the value of interactive advertising.

About Flixster

Flixster (www.flixster.com) is a community for movie fans of all shapes and sizes. Whether you are a die-hard horror fan or lover of romantic comedies (or both), Flixster is a place where you can find others who share your taste and through them discover new movies that you will love. A little less than two years old, Flixster is already one of the largest movie sites on the web with over 15 million unique visitors and over 1 billion movie ratings.

About PalTalk:

Paltalk is the premier real-time, video-based chat community. With more than 4 million members and thousands of chat rooms to choose from on virtually every subject. Members interact with each other through real-time voice, text and video chat. For more information please visit www.paltalk.com.

About Meez:

www.meez.com is a leading online social entertainment network that fuses avatars, gaming and a robust virtual economy to create more interactive online communities. Our platform supports the building of animated 3D avatars, live interactions in virtual spaces and competitive online gaming, creating an immersive environment where users can personalize their experience and connect with friends

About PerfSpot:

PerfSpot (www.perfspot.com) was created to provide the perfect web portal for people of any age, gender, or background to share their interests and favorite things on the web.

About Fotolog

Fotolog (www.fotolog.com) is the world's leading photo-blogging site, one of the world's largest social networking sites and a global cultural phenomenon. More than 13 million members in over 200 countries use Fotolog as a simple and fun way to express themselves through online photo diaries or photo blogs.

About Huffington Post:

The Huffington Post is a news and opinion website which in three years has become an influential media brand -- "The Internet Newspaper." The site offers coverage of politics, media, business, entertainment, living and green, and is a top destination for news, blogs and original content. The Huffington Post ("HuffPost") has over 10 million unique users each month and is the most- linked-to blog on the Internet, per Technorati. The Huffington Post has 1,500+ influential bloggers -- from celebrities and politicians to academics and policy experts -- who contribute in real-time on a wide-range of topics making news today, including: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Wesley Clark, Nora Ephron, Ari Emanuel, Mia Farrow, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, Gary Hart, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Bill Maher, Nancy Pelosi, Margaret Cho and Alec Baldwin. A comprehensive list of the contributors to The Huffington Post can be found in its bloggers index: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/index/.

About The Media Kitchen

The Media Kitchen (www.themediakitchen.tv) is a new kind of media strategy, planning, buying and management company designed to address the gamut of communications challenges clients face today. The Media Kitchen defines media as "anything that can carry a branded message and impact the consumer" and believes that media strategy should be an essential component to any brand's message, not merely a means of distributing it. Clients include Panasonic, Limited Brands, PBS, Delta Airlines, MoheganSun, Windstream Communications, Starz and Bank of NY Mellon.

  CONTACT:
  Anthony Rapacciuolo
  PRcision LLC
  Phone: (212) 404-1451
  Email: ajr@prcision.com

4 Minutes and a Buzzer

4 minutes and a Buzzer…..

 

Last week at Lotame, we embarked on an adventurous exercise.  

 

The event was billed as a “sharing of idea in 4 minutes.”   Lotame is now north of 40 employees, and growing.  We have engineers, developers, software specialists, business analysts, and some very skilled operations folks who are helping us, both – create value and scale our business.   We continue to grow in people (employees) as well as – industry traction (growth of revenue and results) amongst our clients -- both publisher and advertiser……

 

I’m excited, humbled, and honored about our accomplishments, and journey that our team has traveled on to get us to this point……and, there is much still to do.   We are at the base of this mountain, called Social Media – and starting to scale this challenge uphill….we’ve got our proverbial hiking boots on.

 

But, one often overlooked factor in a hyper growth organization, is the WILLINGNESS AND ABILITY of a company to listen to its people…..it’s most important ingredient.

 

Listen to its DNA.  The way each of us must listen to our human bodies – to see signs of progress, growth, and health (not..) 

 

A company actually listening to its employees?

 

Listen is what we did – see copy of email sent to team below.

 

From:

Andy Monfried

Sent: Friday, May 23, 2008 10:32 AM
To: Team
Subject: 4 minutes of Ideas.....

 

Gang:

 

Next week….

 

I had an idea, and I’d like to do it next Thursday 5-29-08 at 11:00-1:00pm.

 

Titled the “Elk Ridge Open Brainstorm” – I’d like each employee to attend a 90 minute open meeting…..

 

Why, and what is the meeting about?

 

The meeting is about “sharing ideas” and brainstorming our company – and it’s evolution in a fast paced industry.

 

Ideally – I’d like each person to come with ONE IDEA about how they think their concept can add more value to what we are doing…..

 

It can be:

 

1)       a new idea

2)       a new business model

3)       a new technology (or a new spin on some of our technology)

4)       a new way of selling what we do

5)       a new way of marketing what we do

6)       a new way of “running” the company

7)       a new way of looking at our data

 

What I’m literally asking for is your input.  Please give it some thought…..I’d like each of you to come a bit prepared, as in a mission statement or a sentence about what you want to discuss (it does not have to be one of the choices above) it can be anything you think of……but here is what I’m asking

 

a)       you have an idea prepared so please give it some thought

b)       you can present your idea and discuss it.

c)       We can debate it

d)       We have time to debate it. (after you present your new idea)

 

By my count, we have roughly xx people who will attend this on Thursday. 

Starting at 11:00 am each person gets to read, or discuss their idea.

We as a group spend 4 minutes per person discussing the brainstorm.

After 4 minutes we move on to the next person.  So, the schedule looks like this:

 

11:00-11:04 – Robert XXXX

11:05-11:09 – Dave XXXXX

11:10-11:14 – Andy XXXXX

11:15-11:19 –Kevin XXXXX

 

(Jessica, will continue to fill out the rest – but you get the idea)

 

We will have a timer that will buzz after 4 minutes to move on to the next person…..(the 4 minutes includes group debate)

 

Jessica will be taking notes, (and anyone else that would like to help) – and, we will reward the top 3 ideas…(as determined by moi’)

 

Lunch will be brought in at the conclusion of our group 4 minute segments…..(please let Jessica know if you will be out next Thursday)

 

I’m very excited for this – and I’m looking forward to each of your input, guidance and creative ideas to CREATE MORE value…..utilizing your most important element, your insight…..

 

Big love, and enjoy the weekend.

 

Andy

 

************************************************************************

 

Key takeaways:

 

1)      Many people “pre-loaded” their presentations into a conference room computer, or plugged their laptops into a projector

2)      The presentations and question time stopped immediately when the timer buzzed, and we moved on to the next person – there was approximately 30 seconds tops between presentations

3)      Typically the presentations were 3-5 slides, which allowed for 1-2 minutes of questions, and 1-2 minutes of questions or bouncing of ideas around the room.

4)      Great ideas were shared – and it began a ton of brainstorming inside of 4 minutes, forcing many to be VERY CONCISE, and quick.

5)      Great ideas are being explored and may go into production shortly

6)      Insight and Ideas were discussed and brought forth THAT I’VE NEVER THOUGHT OF , which was so awesome……

7)      We are making a “book” of these ideas, like a time capsule

8)      We had a timer/clock on the table preset to 4 minutes for each employee…..

 

 

This exercise and event was both team building, as well as a “listening exercise” – FOR EVERYONE.  It was not a company meeting, or a speech – but rather a genuine environment where  -- ANY CRAZY OR HALF BAKED IDEA COULD BE EXPLORED, AND SHARED.

 

I can tell you from the results, that EVERY single concept presented had validity, and had so called “legs…”   All were well thought out, and all were well received.

 

4 minutes of listening……