TechBytes with Adam Solomon, Chief Marketing Officer at Lotame

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Lotame.

I’ve taken on the role of CMO at Lotame where I lead strategic marketing and product development for the company globally, supporting worldwide demand for our unstacked approach to data solutions.

Tell us about the ‘unstacked’ approach that Lotame provides and promotes.

The large marketing stack companies offer data management technologies as a feature of a much larger Rube Goldberg machine that is underprioritized, underinvested, underdeveloped, and neglected. Publishers and marketers demand more flexibility and tailoring, making the stacked DMP obsolete. Data technology partners have to provide a diverse portfolio of solutions and capabilities that cater to specific needs.

This is where the unstacked approach comes into play. Lotame has an incredibly flexible product architecture that is uniquely positioned to satisfy the needs of the marketplace. While the large martech companies focus on stacking media experience tools on top of their DMPs to grow revenue for adjacent business lines, we’ve gone the other direction to help clients grow their revenue. We unstacked our solutions to give enterprise clients the ability to mix and match tools and capabilities in a cost-effective manner based on specific need.

What are the major challenges in fully leveraging data technology for bespoke unstacked solutions? How do you ensure this approach fits into modern Marketing Technology stacks?

Among publishers and marketers, the need for data-driven solutions has exploded. For publishers, data powers advertising in programmatic and direct channels, across all formats and inventory types. Data can also fuel audience development, content development, data licensing, and consumer marketing, enabling publishers to scale users and revenue. For marketers and agencies, data unlocks new customer engagement and acquisition opportunities through smarter and more efficient multi-channel marketing. On both the sell and the buy-side, the potential applications for audience data are exploding and diversifying. As a result, the demand for one-size-fits-all martech stacks is shifting in favor of specialized data solutions.

How are Data Management platforms evolving with the maturity of Data Science, AI, Automation and Data Visualization?

Companies are becoming more sophisticated in their data needs and strategies. As part of this change, there has been a huge surge in the need for data science, AI automation and data visualization experts and tools resulting in DMPs needing to evolve with the sophistication of the market.

How do these components converge at Lotame?

Lotame uses data science and AI to power many of our products. AI Automation powers Audience Optimizer, a solution for lookalike modeling that uses machine learning technology. Audience Optimizer is used for clients for prospecting and scaling, and also supports other Lotame products such as Precision Demographic Audiences. We work with data science teams across many different organizations to provide them with a raw firehose of data with our Data Stream product. Lotame Analytics visualizes audience and campaign data, but we are also building out robust partnerships with companies that specialize in data visualization so our clients can visualize their data in whichever manner best appeals to them.

How do you compete with the leading Data Management and Exchange companies – Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and Adobe?

We compete by being the only large-scale independent solution on the marketplace. Lotame has the ability to give any customer direct access to the inner workings of our DMP so they can have a personalized, tailored approach to building their own in-house tech stack. None of our competitors are able to provide this option, putting us in a unique position to allow our customers to grow their revenue how they see fit.

What’s your advice to MarTech teams who are looking at Data Solutions for their various Marketing and Publishing efforts?

The big considerations are what value will come out of using a data solution, and how that value will be spread. With so many lanes to collect, analyze and distribute data findings, organizations can often become lost in the midst of endless information. My main piece of advice for marketers and publishers is to understand what data is most necessary for their campaigns, and to take that information to providers they work with and together develop strategies that will ultimately bring the most anticipated success.

What does your product roadmap for 2019 look like?

We just announced the wide release of Data Stream, Lotame’s Data Firehose as a Service (DFaaS) product. The product allows clients to gain access to:

• An always-on firehouse of their own first-party data
• Cconsumer attribute and behavioral enrichment data from Lotame’s global data marketplaces or
• Lotame’s Device Graph and ID mapping data, which connects customer data across devices and platforms, driving engagement anywhere and on any screen.

The Data Stream DFaaS product gives enterprise companies and their data science teams the data they need to fuel their marketing technology infrastructure, all in a completely scalable and privacy-compliant manner.

With our new Unstacked approach, we have more products and updates in the pipeline with a focus on omnichannel and connectivity, actionable 360 degree consumer insights, and data quality and transparency, that we’re excited to share more about soon.