Lotame has a way for advertisers to get tons of data — if they can handle it

Lotame started the year with a series of new ways to help advertisers use data in specific ways. With its latest product, the adtech company is unleashing the data in a continuous, real-time flow. The product is called the Data Stream, and Rishit Shah, the company’s head of strategy and innovation, likens it to a firehose.

Whatever the metaphor, it takes data from 200 suppliers that are available to Lotame’s existing data exchange, and sends it to clients for analysis.
“We are streaming it out for someone to find a diamond [in the rough] for a specific use case,” Shah said.
Shah believes it’s a more powerful level of data for advertisers beyond an aggregate level, but companies need the infrastructure to connect.
“We are going after companies who have the ability to process and store and analyze this kind of data. Not everyone has this kind of capability,” Shah said.
Several clients are beta testing the product, which is offered on a subscription basis. One early user is Rise Interactive, a Chicago-based digital marketing agency.
Shah sees the data as being used in three main arenas:

• Predictions: Identifying trends and figuring out what might happen ahead of an event, such as a product launch.
• Personalization: Figuring out people’s preferences so they can suggest or target content.
• Market Research: Analyzing behavior to influence decision making.

Lotame, which has offices in Columbia as well as New York, is one of several companies that feature former members of Baltimore-based Advertising.com among its ranks. More product offerings have followed as the company sees more uses of the data exchange it built as advertisers increasingly look to automated — or programmatic, in industry lingo — campaigns that target specific consumers, and seek to find them on multiple devices.
Consumer brands are an obvious target for the data stream, but Shah said Lotame also sees financial and tech firms that have in-house data capabilities as potential clients.
There’s precedent for such a massive quantity of data. Twitter’s dataset, also a firehose, has proved to be a sought-after tool for identifying consumer trends. But Shah said that data is mainly event-centered, informing companies about what is happening in the moment and what happens as a result.
The Data Stream is people-centered, he said, going beyond the moment to provide insight on what people are doing as a result of the events.