Social ad targeting firm, Lotame, named Eric Porres it’s Chief Marketing Officer in a release today. Read it on the Lotame blog. Lotame also announced that it’s paying the piper (ComScore) to be included in the ComScore ad network report as the company looks to position itself against the reach of traditional ad networks.
Porres leaves Underscore Marketing where he was a founding partner with Tom Hespos. In his new marketing role, Porres said that – among his many duties – he will be heading up Lotame’s research and insights initiatives similar to last September’s “Interactivity Over Clicks” report on Social Targeting (Download the PDF).
Porres sparred with AdExchanger.com via email earlier today:
AdExchanger.com: Considering the media services capabilities of Lotame and its competitive set, do you think Lotame can someday disintermediate certain agencies? If so, under what conditions?
EP: Good agencies are truly “agents” for their clients, and as such help their clients make objective decisions about media and marketing solutions. We empower those agencies who work with us with audience intelligence and marketing insight gleaned from our social data. Historically we have never done an ‘end-run’ around agencies.
AdExchanger.com: Isn’t social targeting just another way of spinning behavioral advertising – it’s all about a user profile isn’t it? Maybe the only difference is social targeting puts more emphasis on a user’s connections. Fair?
EP: Unfair! Profile information makes up less than 10% of our total audience knowledge; it’s a rich data set, but ultimately a subset of what we capture about human behavior. To the extent that we are currently seen and play in the sandbox of ‘social,’ there are others in the space that use user connections as the engine by which they drive their business. That’s not our exclusive focus. Lotame collects declared information (e.g. age, gender, interests) from profile pages across our publisher partner network. We then add a layer of collection and organizational intelligence around undeclared interests and human actions (e.g. voting, sharing, joining, emailing, inviting, posting, creating, uploading, searching). These two essential features enable Lotame to generate custom audiences and insights in real-time.
Also of note with the Porres’ move, Lotame gains a wine connoisseur. Cheers!
