Lotame touts 'firehose-level access' to 'guts' of platform

Arguing that one-size-fits-all martech stacks are Rube Goldberg constructions that favour their vendors more than their users, Lotame has announced a new philosophy: exposing the "guts" of its DMP (data-management platform) in a series of "unstacked" tools that gives publishers, marketers and agencies more flexibility to build their data infrastructure.

As a first example of the approach, the company also announced a DFaaS (data firehose as a service) product called Data Stream, which, it says gives "enterprise companies and their data-science teams the data they need to fuel their marketing technology infrastructure, all in a completely scalable and privacy-compliant manner".

CEO Andy Monfried said that Lotame is "effectively giving companies firehose-level access to the guts of the Lotame platform with direct access to the data and functionality that underpins a DMP". While the large martech stack providers are walled gardens, holding consumer data within their applications, Lotame is making it easier for clients to directly access and analyze their own consumer data. "No one else is doing anything like this today," he claimed.

Data use cases are more varied, complicated and sophisticated than ever, but 'stacked' DMPs are usually "a feature of a much larger Rube Goldberg machine that is underprioritized, underinvested, underdeveloped, and neglected", Monfried said.

Lotame said it has been providing bespoke tool suites to large customers for some time, and this announcement signals its intent to formally "productize" these tailored solutions, making them widely available to all new and existing clients.

"While the large martech companies focus on stacking media experience tools on top of their DMPs to grow revenue for adjacent business lines, we’ve gone the other direction to help clients grow their revenue," Monfried said.

The Data Steam product provides clients with access to:

• An always-on firehouse of their own first-party data
• Consumer attribute and behavioral enrichment data from Lotame’s global data marketplaces, or
• Lotame’s Device Graph and ID mapping data, which connects customer data across devices and platforms

Lotame also announced the appointment of Adam Solomon as CMO. He was most recently chief product officer at programmatic direct mail company PebblePost. Prior to that he served as general manager for Hearst’s programmatic and data solutions division, Core Audience, and has led digital ad product efforts at Time Inc. and Viacom Media Networks.

This is a video from a Lotame event in Sydney in late February: