The Evolution of Our Business at Lotame

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