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
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