TechBytes with Evgeny Popov, Global Vice President at Lotame

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

I am the Head of Global Data Solutions where I am responsible for driving data revenue globally (APAC, EMEA, LATAM, and NA) for the Lotame Data Exchange via data acquisition deals and strategic partnerships. To manage our global data solutions business across both the buy and sell sides, I work closely with the data operations team and supervise the global data sales.

In this role, I’m aiming to change the world of data across the entire supply chain, formulate supply strategy and power data intelligence for data buyers as well as be an advocate for data privacy, compliance, and governance.

I actually moved from Singapore where I was VP of Data Solutions, APAC, to our headquarters in New York to take on this new position. While there, I also served as Senior Director and Lead Organizer for AdTech Meetups in Australia and Hong Kong, and as Co-Chairman of Marketing and Ad Technology for IAB Singapore and Ad Tech Advisory Council in Sydney. In April 2019, I joined the IAB NYC Data Center of Excellence as a Board Member.

How did you arrive at Lotame?

I joined Lotame back in 2015, while living in Sydney, as Director of Platform Solutions APAC where I was the most senior technical resource in the region. I worked across both the sales and client success teams to consult and design technical solutions for prospects and existing clients, ensuring that clients realize the full value that the Lotame platform can provide.

I got into advertising technology to diversify my skill set, from a pure tech focus more into business, marketing and commercial. Advertising was a happy pill that solved that equation for me, and I’ve never looked back since.

What is the current technology roadmap to build B2B Data Solutions?

Lotame works with multiple global B2B data players in providing robust data solutions, strategy, and integrations. Our B2B focus for 2019 is to introduce a validity layer across top categories including company size, decision-makers, functional area, industry, and professional groups.

How is the North American DSP market different from European and APAC markets? How do you plan to grow your customer base in lagging markets?

DSP or Data? The data markets are vastly different, based on data sources available and lack of offline-to-online capabilities in APAC. We work with an array of publishers and data providers in emerging tier two and three markets (such as Vietnam and Myanmar in SEA) to grow our digital footprint. On the other hand, we already own a 90%+ market share in Singapore and Hong Kong.

What are the key components of the Global DMP platform for omnichannel revenue growth?

DMP by design has interoperability in mind thus allowing data to flow to any activation channel to allow omnichannel marketing. The key to this is connectivity across platforms and channels. At Lotame, we have our first-party connectivity suite which gives marketers the ability to collect data from online and offline sources, map it together, and determine the relationships that exist between billions of signals flowing from desktops, smartphones, tablets, and connected devices such as smart TVs. Our second and third-party data marketplaces, along with our Machine Learning look-alike modeling tool, allows customers to layer on additional profiles for scale.

Why do brands fail to fully understand real-time Data in Marketing and Sales? How do you train your team to understand these challenges better and overcome these?

Brands have become a lot savvier in the last few years in terms of data strategy and data application. Most brands that use third-party data for targeting understand that data quality, and data recency, is important. Those that use their own first-party data for targeting, personalization, and analytics know that the data needs to be real-time in order for it to have significant meaning and impact on their campaigns and other initiatives. For example, if a brand is looking to target people in-market for a new car, the data needs to be as real-time as possible, as they don’t want to waste ad spend on profiles that already purchased the said car.

At Lotame, we take great pride in offering high quality, accurate data at scale. We scrub our data marketplace for bots, work with validation partners to validate third party data, and offer Precision Demographic Audiences that exceed industry benchmarks. Our Data Solutions team works to educate our Lotame Data Exchange and DMP clients on the value of quality data and our methodology behind ensuring our data is the highest quality possible.

Tell us more about your AI and Machine Learning initiatives.

Our Lotame LAB product suite features audience building tools and automation to create, optimize and package high-performing data segments based on business needs. AI and Machine Learning play a pivotal role in our look-alike and act-alike modeling tool, Audience Optimizer. Audience Optimizer allows brands to create powerful look-alike audiences to increase prospecting pools or to refine audience composition based on performance criteria. Users can leverage advanced Machine Learning to create high performing modeled segments, to improve campaign targeting, increase reach or monetize data.

What is your prediction on the disruptive application of the Lotame platform for OTT, TV Analytics and Live Streaming?

TV is a hot topic right now and will continue to be for the next few years, as Advanced TV, OTT, and more streaming partnerships develop. Lotame has a good grip on ACR/TV viewership data. In fact, Lotame already distributes Smart TV Data Segments – allowing advertisers to reach and engage with television viewers by targeting audiences across all digital devices using Lotame Device Graph to resolve identity. With Lotame’s Smart TV Data Segments, brands can either target viewers by Network, Show, Genre, etc. or they can retarget viewers that have seen their commercials on TV or conquest viewers that have seen their competitors’ commercials.