AdTech Pro Adam Solomon of Lotame Chats About #DMEXCO 2019

By Sudipto Ghosh On Sep 16, 2019

Last week, MarTech company Lotame, was at DMEXCO 2019. At the global event for AdTech innovations and discussions, Lotame announced the launch of Lotame PDX to respond to persistent demands from the market for “increased data trust, transparency, and quality.”

At the event, we caught up with Lotame’s CMO and AdTech Veteran, Adam Solomon.

Here is what Adam had to say:

What differentiates Lotame PDX from other data exchanges?

Today’s privacy-sensitive climate – post-GDPR and pre-CCPA – makes finding the right data partner harder than ever.

For buyers, transparency into the data source, quality and reliability are paramount. These heightened standards make finding, vetting and verifying partners — and their datasets — a herculean task.

For sellers, many lack the infrastructure and expertise to meet the right partners, package and price audiences and make those datasets easily accessible. Also, the recent attention around privacy has called into question data quality and its provenance, raising the stakes for data providers to curate transparent, high-quality datasets.

Unfortunately, for both sides, there’s a gap in the market. Buyers and sellers alike need a private and exclusive high-quality marketplace that makes it easy and advantageous to find the right data partner. Until now, nothing like this has existed.

We’re solving that with our new exchange. We believe true partnership is built on transparency, flexibility, and trust and PDX enables that. We’re making it easier for high-quality and trusted buyers and sellers to find one another.

How does PDX address privacy/transparency concerns?

Lotame PDX offers both sides peace of mind by building a direct connection to one another in a safe and private environment. This direct connection will forge data trust in buyers by showing exactly where their data is being sourced and how. Every data partner is vetted and verified to meet regional regulatory guidelines, including GDPR and CCPA privacy-compliance standards, as well as IAB data transparency standards.

For sellers, the platform brings high-end buyers to their private door, who you may not know otherwise.

Lotame PDX offers tools to onboard, organize, monetize and sell data from a secure and centralized platform. Sellers can also control what they sell, at what price and to whom, and how the data may be used.

What trends are you seeing in audience data currently?

The demand for transparency in advertising is also impacting how marketers work with and buy data. Ten years ago, audience-based data targeting was novel and attractive to both marketers and publishers. It created value out of remnant inventory for media companies and created a more actionable online inventory for marketers. This novelty drove interest which then drove the need for more scale.

But today, scale is a given in the market. To be candid, lots of providers have access to audience data. For that reason, marketers are starting to focus more on the quality of data – its accuracy. In the conversations we had with partners and customers at DMEXCO, for example, it was clear that they’re focused on ways to ensure the quality and precision of the data they purchase for campaigns and activations. And with recent GDPR and privacy crackdowns, the provenance, recency, and origin of data are more important than ever. Focusing on data quality and accuracy, not scale, is the future of our industry.

Also Read: TechBytes with Adam Solomon, Chief Marketing Officer at Lotame

What changes/growth are you expecting in the data space over the next year?

There are changes for advertisers and publishers. Let’s talk about the publisher’s side. We work with some of the biggest and most sophisticated publishers in the world, from Hearst to the Ozone Project, which is comprised of the UK’s most prestigious news publishers. (In fact, we just announced that relationship and we’re very excited about it.) Because of this experience, we’re in tune with the myriad of data challenges publishers are facing.

From privacy regulations like GDPR and the CCPA to browser changes from companies like Mozilla and Apple, publishers are grappling with how to appropriately collect and activate their data to fuel content creation, sell inventory and deliver effective ads. Unfortunately, in response to those changes, some data tools are taking advantage of slick marketing, promising publishers a one-note solution to GDPR and CCPA that focuses solely on creating more first-party data opportunities. But that’s not where the industry is.

The business has evolved beyond that, where information has to be passed outside of the browser. Publishers need data solutions that serve as “pipes” – that help them share audience data across environments and partners. Those that don’t have that are losing out on revenue opportunities.

On the advertiser side, first-party data has become increasingly valuable as things like cookie-blockers, ITP, and GDPR limit access to data. We expect that trend to continue to grow over the next several years, especially as more privacy legislation comes into play. Additionally, we at Lotame saw a 1,200% year-over-year growth in second-party data adoption in April. This explosive growth of second-party data demonstrates the impact privacy regulation and transparency needs have had on data strategies. In the post-GDPR era, data buyers require assurances as to the quality and precision of the data they purchase for campaigns and activations.

Second-party data gives buyers that knowledge and comfort so we anticipate that we’ll continue to see the usage increase. There is also zero-party data, which is data that customers willingly share with marketers. Hailed as the avenue to rebuild trust and create meaningful connections with consumers, we’ll see the use of zero-party grow, especially with continued regulation over the collection and use of audience data.

Also Read: TechBytes with Evgeny Popov, Global Vice President at Lotame