When You Know A Lotame, You Can Target Better

Social media has been, as well all know, a bear to monetize. Because of the nature of UGC, advertisers have been somewhat reticent to come into these pages, and then rather unwilling to pay much for the ads if they do.



Fixing that is what Lotame is about. Founded in 2006, Lotame is focused on monetizing social media by collecting information about page users and then using that data to help advertisers find the right eyeballs.

So it's behavioral, contextual, and demographic all at once in a way, and those concepts are probably old hat to you. But the key challenge with social is that a lot of it is long tail, and monetizing that stuff really isn't the strength of the BT and ad network majors.

Enter Lotame, a startup in Maryland that just got $13MM in its second round. As I understand it, Lotame is collecting anonymous info from page visits, online profiles, and other interactions for the purposes of identifying PRECISELY targeted consumer segments that help advertisers reach the most productive eyes, and publishers make mroe from their traffic, ad views, and users.

They describe themselves in this manner:

Lotame Solutions, Inc., founded in 2006 in Elkridge, Maryland, is a company dedicated to providing solutions within social media. Our Crowd Control Technology™ offers social media sites the most advanced monetization techniques and allows brands to build and target customizable consumer audiences. We aim to increase revenue for our publishers and allow advertisers to target unique users across multiple social media sites. The company has now grown to include offices in major metropolitan areas.

Here's Andrew Monfried, Founder and CEO, interviewed on WallStrip:



I am just guessing here, but the filtration of available data from social media pages must be an enormous challenge. How do you skim out the PII, as well as all the holla holla talk, to identify the bits that are going to determine who can be expected to respond to a marketer message.

There's is an extremely data driven business -- not surprisingly a number of their employees are vets of the ad network biz, where managing and "usefulizing" enormous quantities of page visitation and other data are core to the revenue streams.

Regular readers of this blog know that I believe deeply in the value of data assuming it is actionable data. As a market research vet, I know a lot of the info out there is perhaps nice to know, or interesting to know, but not need to know. This is even more of an issue today than it was, say 5 years ago, because there is so much mroe data available. Most of it not actionable in your quest to improve the bottom line. One visit to Lotame's site shows that hey are very much focused on the data points that will drive results.

Check out their site. There's lots of video and a really interesting action-oriented take on how to make social media visits and page views actionable and lucrative.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.