Lotame has hired a new CRO as the independent, 10-year-old data management platform seeks to compete in a category increasingly dominated by marketing clouds.
The company’s new revenue chief, Eric Marterella, spent the past five years leading global enterprise sales for social media marketing platform Sprinklr.
His responsibilities at Lotame will include managing global client retention and ensuring the company is meeting its marketing and revenue targets.
Marterella hopes to apply his experience running sales at a $2 billion SaaS-based business at Lotame, first by diversifying its client base and expanding internationally.
Marterella is also tasked with helping Lotame push beyond its core base of publisher customers to servicing more brands and agencies. He previously worked at brands Cisco and AT&T in account management.
“The goal, candidly, is to fight hard against that marketing cloud surge,” Marterella said. “There is a lot of upside for us to work with marketers to drive business outcomes. After working in a social channel almost exclusively for five years, I felt I could do similar in a first-, second- and third-party way at Lotame.”
Lotame originated as a publisher-focused DMP and attributes 68% growth in net new revenue this year to brands – with about half of that business coming from incumbent cloud competitors, Marterella claimed.
“Our biggest obstacle,” he said, “is simplifying our go-to-market and telling an effective story so that CMOs, CIOs [and] chief digital officers recognize there’s an independent [DMP] that doesn’t have all these co-dependencies and services” sometimes associated with larger cloud stacks.
While independent DMP-DSP hybrids like DataXu and MediaMath still exist, Marterella sees Lotame’s position as one of the only independent pure-play DMPs as an advantage since it isn’t tethered to complex technology integrations like larger cloud competitors.
As more marketers take ownership of their data and seek more transparency in their partner supply chain, Lotame says it’s doubling down on its private, second-party data marketplace, noting a looming data quality initiative to come in 2018.
And, while Lotame continues to invest in North America, where it has an established base of second-generation DMP customers, the company is addressing new geographical nuances in emerging markets.
“There are a lot of areas to expand [such as in London] because of the uncertainty around GDPR,” Marterella said. “It’s also really exciting to work with brands in places like India or Singapore, where we’re seeing more advertisers who are willing to invest.”
