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As of today, I’ll be leaving the Lotame family to pursue a new endeavor called Spinback.com.

Like all hard decisions, this one was not easy but here’s the story:

When I first started Lotame I was in the midst of building a business called TheCampusAtlas.com with three of my engineering buddies from school. But through a coincidental encounter at Mount Snow I met Andy Monfried who was also in the midst of starting a new business called Lotame. At the time I wasn’t quite sure what to do. We had already launched on 5 schools and had about 10 more on deck. So the question was, do I pick up the dice on Campus Atlas and join Andy’s new business? Or do I ride out the true startup wave with my friends and see where the … Read More »

Doug Weaver wrote a great piece today titled The New Oreo, Part 3: The Audience Layer.

“Anyone mildly plugged into digital advertising in 2010 can’t possibly ignore the noise and energy around audience buying.

…

There are many people in our industry who can go a lot deeper on this topic than I…”

I’ll attempt to take it a bit “deeper” but will do so around his 4 premises.

It’s a Different Marketplace: “Audience buying is happening, and it is going to happen more”, but today, the market is not transparent. There are many companies out there that can sell your data for a price (and if not tied to media its probably much less), but what value are you getting other than a new, arguably small revenue stream? Are you learning about data strategies for your own organization? Are you learning about audience data collection, segmentation and … Read More »

When things get so complicated the best thing you can do is go back to the basics.

In today’s world of online advertising, the “basics” are changing so it’s important to understand what those changes are and how they affect a marketer’s business.

I wrote a piece that was featured in today’s iMedia Connection that discusses this very point.

Excerpt from the article:

We are at the cusp of a new age of online advertising. As news ways of thinking about the ecosystem emerge, so too are there new ways for advertising campaign deployment. Math now seems as equally important as creativity. Technology now seems as important as artistic ability. This evolving trend has spawned new companies and has required older companies to change their very DNA, and with that, their name or classification.

The entire piece is here.

Things used to be much simpler…

Read More »

The online advertising industry at large is sprinting towards maximizing efficiency. Overall, the working theory is that smart aggregation and assembly of various technology providers will create a unique solution for display advertising, and one that combines audience targeting, procurement, arbitrage and media trade. However, if, as Randall Rothenberg, CEO of IAB, states: “technology succeeds in driving the cost of reaching the perfect audience down to zero” in his latest post titled “Is Marketing a Strategic Resource or a Procured Commodity?” then the industry might be fumbling towards false ecstasy, with “the same low costs, the same perfect efficiency, for doing the same exact thing.”

Allow me to explain. With all of the aggregation and consolidation of publishers, networks, and exchanges, in many instances, an overlap occurs with publisher inventory. Think about a typical web publisher in today’s ecosystem. Think about … Read More »

The world will never be the same. Our society used to build machines and parts, in factories and in assembly lines. Today, our society builds computer programs and data bases, on laptops and in many cases, from anywhere around the world. People and businesses are becoming more efficient. They are working smarter, not harder, because they are beginning to leverage the most valuable employee of all: Data.

Take for example the airline industry. Consider all those times you got bumped off of a flight, rescheduled, canceled, or offered money to take a different flight. We’ve all been there and it always happens for a reason. This reason is that airlines try to prevent the loss of business and in doing so, they look at dozens of consumer driven behaviors such as how long you travel for, how many weekend flights you … Read More »

With all of the latest advances in digital media, we are still in the infancy stage when it comes to data intelligence and informative decision making. Consider what is currently happening in the display advertising space. Data and media are continuing to diverge as two separate commodities. On one hand there are data exchanges making cookie files or user information available for purchase. On the other hand, there are media exchanges that make media available for purchase letting businesses use primary or secondary cookie files from other sources to make the ad decision.

This new divergence between data and media, coupled with the notion that bigger is better when it comes to data, makes for an interesting dynamic in today’s industry. Companies are looking to build their own, large cookie pools. In some cases, these are companies with no real technology … Read More »

I created this video a while back for one of my college classes. It’s amazing how far an industry has come in such a short period of time. Even crazier to think that it’s only getting started.

(Need to turn up the volume)

(This post can also be found on the Lotame Learnings Blog)

A recent study came out by Knowledge Networks titled: “Internet users turn to social media to seek one another, not brands or products.” Without even looking at the numbers, I think it’s safe to bet that it is in fact true that “Internet users turn to social media to seek one another, not brands or products.” There are two parts to every statistical experiment: 1) The design and 2) the analysis. In the case of this study, it is a bit troubling to see how biased the experiment is without even reading past the title. What do you think the results would be if I put out a report titled: “Music lovers turn to radio to seek music, not brands or products”, or “Movie lovers turn to movie theaters to … Read More »

Data is King. If you don’t believe me, consider this:

Rental car companies and insurers are refusing service to people with poor credit scores because data mining tells them that credit scores correlate with a higher likelihood of having an accident.
Nowadays when a flight is canceled, airlines will skip over their frequent fliers and give the next open seat to the mine-identified customer whose continued business is most at risk. Instead of following a first-come, first-serve rule, companies will condition their behavior on literally dozens of consumer-specific factors.
The “No Child Left Behind” Act, which requires schools to adopt teaching methods supported by rigorous data analysis, is causing teachers to spend up to 45 percent of class time training kids to pass standardized tests. Super Crunching is even shifting some teachers toward class lessons where every word is scripted and statistically … Read More »

(Disclaimer: I currently work for Lotame Solutions).

Let’s face it, the “Social Media” buzz word has been used a bit much these days doing two things:

Validating its importance and relevance in an evolving communications landscape. As the usage statistics for these social sites and platforms continue to grow, the constant referencing of the term “social media” or “social web” will only continue to rise (Warning: The web is becoming social).
Making it extremely difficult for marketers to navigate through the hundreds of “Social Media” marketing solutions. It’s not that there are not too many “social media sites/platforms”, but too many social media marketing solutions. For example, Facebook is a social media site with, as of now, a relatively weak marketing solution given their decision to remain extremely focused on increasing the overall user experience. Lotame and the other companies mentioned in this … Read More »