Our Tech and Product Team is doing so much GREAT building -- that I thought it was time to share some of our accomplishments, and things we've released into our technology. I love transparency. Being transparent can be a blessing and a curse. I am choosing to share and be transparent, because I truly believe we have the best engineers, developers, DBA's and UI people in digital media. I'm not sure of too many companies willing to share their "release notes" with the world. (for both competititors and enemies to see)......
Recent Release notes are below. I LOVE this stuff. (it's not for everyone) -- but, it is for people who want to better understand the cutting edge features of data management - and the differentiation of technologies, and the people that build them.
Andy
(thanks to Craig Connell for his blessing, and his wisdom in publicizing this)
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We at Lotame put great emphasis on our agility - our ability not only to quickly respond to customer and potential customer requests, but to also bring new innovation to the market at a rapid pace. Central to this ability is the agile process our entire company utilizes to design and implement new features and fix any missteps we might have made along the way (bugs). We push new functionality in the products every two weeks, sometimes big and new, sometimes small, but always improving.
The sampling of release notes below from our last two releases, both in February, provide some insight into how we keep the company moving, keep the product fresh, and keep our customers happy. Make sure to check back in two weeks if you want to even more insight into how quickly we innovate, as we will post our full set of release notes for that release with some exiting new features!
What’s New in Audience Builder: Sort Categories by Unique Size, Filter Categories with Zero Uniques, and a New List
Here’s what’s new in the Audience Builder:
The My Uniques and w/ 3rd Party columns are now sortable
Users can sort the categories by largest to smallest based on their uniques totals. This makes it easier to see categories that have strong unique totals. You can also sort the columns so that the categories with the lowest totals appear at the top.
Hide Categories with Zero Uniques
- Hide rows where "My Data" has 0 Uniques: Users can hide My Data categories that have zero uniques. This is useful if the user wants to build an audience with just their own categories and doesn’t want to see categories with zero uniques. When you select this option, category rows with zero uniques for My Data will disappear, even if the categories have 3rd Party uniques.
- Hide rows where "3rd Party" has 0 Uniques: Users can hide 3rd party categories that have zero uniques. This is useful if a user wants to add just 3rd party data categories but is not interested in adding categories that have collected zero uniques. They’re probably not interested in adding categories that have no uniques. When you select this option, category rows with zero third party uniques will disappear even if there are uniques for My Data.
The New Advanced Options List
We’ve placed the Hide options together with two pre-existing options into the Advanced Options list. This alleviates congestion on the page and provides easy access to the options. In the Advanced Options List you’ll find the two Hide check boxes and the “Overlap Enabled” and “Filter Publisher” options.
But….Please Note: For the sake of clarity, we’ve changed “Overlap Enabled” to “Enable Overlap” and “Filter Publisher” to “Audience Belongs to”. We have not changed any of the functionality. “Enable Overlap” still turns on/off the overlap feature. “Audience Belongs to” still reveals the data owned by the selected publisher. We changed the name because some users mistakenly thought that when they selected a publisher and purchased data, they were buying data from only the selected publisher.
Figure 1: The new Audience Builder Advanced option list.
Where is the Advanced Options list? Audiences>Find an Audience>Make Changes tab.
The “Not” Option: Users Can Exclude Genders in the Audience Builder
Excluding data points is another way for users to refine their audiences. They can keep the Audience Builder from targeting people who match the audience’s data but who have an interest, action, etc. that you don’t want to target. It’s also called the “Not” Option, as in match people who show an interest in alcohol unless they are underage.
Up until now, users could exclude only categories, age ranges, and locations. Now we’ve added the option to genders. What the heck, you say? Why would I want to do that? Can’t I just omit the genders I don’t want to target? Great question, my Lotamite friend, now read on…
This example comes from Robert Jones, the originator of the request to “Not” gender.
“ I'm currently working on some research that shows that around 6% of our profiles have 2+ genders and 12% have 2+ ages. I've noticed in the new builder that age and gender data can't be "not"-ed like other data types, which makes it impossible to separate out these profiles (by selecting "Male" AND NOT "Female") when we need absolute precision. I believe this would really help us on campaigns like the upcoming XXXXXX campaign (which has to be targeted to women over 18) and alcohol campaigns, which have very strict targeting criteria.
Payout Contracts for Data Selling Publishers
The Data Payout feature allows Lotame to create payout contracts for publishers who sell data through Crowd Control. This feature determines the share of data selling revenue that the publisher and Lotame receive.
For each publisher contract, we can configure the payout method for a given date range. There are two payout methods:
- Revenue Share Percentage: The percentage of data selling revenue that the publisher earns during a given time period. We can also include a monthly minimum payout. A monthly minimum guarantees the publisher will receive a specified payout amount if their calculated payout is less than the monthly minimum. If this happens, an automatic adjustment is added to their payout to bring the payout up to the minimum.
- Flat Fee: A fixed payout amount that the publisher will receive regardless of its data selling activity. If either the start or end dates are mid month, Crowd Control prorates the payout.
The data payout contracts are integrated with the updated Data Revenue Financial reports (released in Sprint 17) where you can track revenue, adjustments, and payout data.
Note: The publisher's payout is either the monthly minimum or the sum of the internal and external payouts, whichever is greater.
Manual Adjustments can be added to fix the payouts retroactively.
Estimated Adjustments in Financial Reports
The Estimated Adjustment to Payouts section shows the estimated automatic adjustments for publishers who have a payout minimum as part of their revenue share contract.
- The Estimated Amount is the Monthly Minimum Payout minus the Payout Earned So Far this Month. The estimates are based on the figures as of the last date shown in the financial report.
You can see the Estimated Adjustments at the bottom of the View Data By Day and View Data By Publisher reports.
Visibility: Applying Optimus Rules to Publishers
The new Optimus Visibility feature allows Lotame to automatically apply Optimus rules to groups of publishers. Up until now, in order to apply rules, Lotame had to manually add a chosen rule to each member separately. Now, we can automatically set up members with rules, thus reducing the labor intensive process.
Two things must happen before rules are applied to a publisher:
Lotame must apply the visibility setting to the rule.
There are two simple settings:
- Network: This setting allows us to give a publisher’s Optimus rules to members of its networks.
- Global: This setting allows Lotame to apply rules to all members. New members will benefit because they can automatically begin using the rules.
A third setting, Client, means that the rule is used only by the publisher and is not applied to other members.
Figure 2: Optimus Rules window (new Visibility list is circled).
Where do I set up Visibility Settings? Admin>Client List>Find Client>Edit Content Based Rules icon 
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Publishers Must be Opted-In
Publishers are not opted in by default. If you want to apply Optimus Visibility to a publisher, you must select one or both of the check boxes circled below. Go to Admin>Client List>Find Client>Click Edit icon> Create/Edit Client tab.
Figure 3: Opt-In Options (new opt in options are circled).
