Lotame has new ways to help digital advertisers use data

For one of the many Baltimore-area adtech startups that was founded by former Advertising.com employees, there wasn’t an easy shorthand to describe Lotame when it formed around 2007.
“When Lotame started, the terminology ‘data management platform’ didn’t even exist,” said Mike Woosley.
The former Ad.com and Videology CFO who joined Lotame as COO late last year allows that the company may have initially been a little ahead of its time. But now that it sits in a recognized category of the adtech stack, it’s seen growth over the last three years. The New York-headquartered company has many of its more than 100 employees at offices in Columbia, and also reaches clients in Europe and Asia through London and Singapore offices.
After adding a new capability to tracks users across different devices in 2014, Lotame has found increasing traction for its software that manages data for brands or agencies that are running digital advertising campaigns. The data helps advertisers tap into specific groups of people they want to target with ads, Woolsey said. The advertisers can also use the data to develop more specific content.
In the first part of 2016, the company is looking to keep staying ahead with more potential devices, and markets. So far this year the company debuted the following:

• An Audience Optimizer that analyzes the behavior of a specific audience to determine whether they will be more likely to engage with an ad.
• A Smart TV product that adds TV viewing habits to the list of behaviors that may predict engagement with digital ads. The company collects data on program, genre, time of day and network. Lotame’s Smart TV Audiences can match TV viewing data it receives from an early, unnamed partner with its data on other portable devices.
• A partnership with marketing analytics firm Kantar Shopcom to make more data available in the increasingly growing Consumer Package Goods. This “CPG” category is the second-largest sector for programmatic buying.

In addition to bringing on Woosley in December, the company also hired Doron Wesly as CMO to add new international business.