Lotame pitches an ‘unstacked’ approach to selling data tools

Lotame is unveiling what it says is a new approach to the data management business, with what it calls an “unstacked” strategy.

Adam Solomon, a former Time Inc. and Viacom executive who recently joined Lotame as chief marketing officer, said this new strategy is illustrated by the launch of Data Stream, which allows publishers and marketers to combine their first party data with Lotame’s device graph connecting consumer data across devices.

The company offered these capabilities before, but Solomon said Data Stream allows Lotame to break it out as an individual product, separate from a larger data management platform.

“Very specifically, what we’re doing is decoupling products and services from the broader platform to solve business challenges for our customers,” said CEO Andy Monfried.

Solomon added that as Lotame customers face an increasingly complicated data landscape, the company has been doing more specialized work with individual clients. So it’s created a product strategy (and catchy marketing term) based on that work.

“Now we’ve taken those bespoke, solutions-oriented features and productized them,” Solomon said. “Instead of a DMP, we really have an unbundled collections of technologies, where we can license individual components of our platform.”

Solomon said a DMP can basically be broken down into four areas: data ingestion at the center (that’s where Data Stream sits), audience segmentation, analytics and a data marketplace. The strategy is to create products focused on each of those areas.

Monfried contrasted this approach with the larger marketing clouds, which he said are trying to sell customers “the full stack of all their products.”

“What we say to clients is, ‘We don’t want to replace a full stack from Adobe or Salesforce, it if makes sense [for] your business,’” he said. “But there are opportunities to augment, or specific tasks they need to solve for.”

In the announcement, IBM Audience Application Lead Tanya Cross described Lotame’s approach as “essential for a large global organization like ours,” adding, “It allows us to pick and choose the right tools for our data needs, giving us the ability to create more informed marketing campaigns and improve our business results.”