• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 16, 2011

Lotame Solutions plans to announce the formation of the Lotame Media Group, as the company continues to integrate services for branded advertisers. The business unit will focus on audience targeting and insights for advertisers by working with brands and agencies that represent them to deliver and analyze online media campaigns.

Lotame Media Group has two sales teams. The agency team will work closely with top ad agencies. The client development team will focus on individual client relationships. Both teams are based in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. A delivery and operations team supports the sales teams from Columbia, Md.

Lotame Sales VP Bryan Seltzer will head the new group, but there's no change to the offerings today. The company will continue to grab from publishers the data that focus on social habits and then creating profiles to deliver media campaigns. "We didn't want any confusion in the marketplace when people begin to hear that we have now started to license the platform outside of the media business," he says. "On the outside nothing has changed, but internally we wanted to separate the two groups."

This thinking is intended to allow existing and potential clients to know the Media Group will tap Lotame's Crowd Control technology to build specific data segments to support the campaigns. Forming the teams focused around the products, Seltzer says the company can operate more efficiently.

Analysts and industry experts believe audience segments and targeting will become the diamond of search engine marketing this year.

Targeted Victory, an agency focusing on politics, has worked with Lotame on several political campaigns. Michael Beach, partner at the agency, points to "insightful" campaign reports and the ability to access several types of services within one company. Sharon Boddie, Integer's VP of media, says the end-of-campaign reports are most helpful because they provide support for recommendations to clients.

The audience segments are built from about two billion data points. The company integrates with ad exchanges such as AppNexus, the Google Exchange and Right Media Exchange.

The move to create a media business unit comes on the heels of closing $11 million in financing. The latest round led by Emergence Capital, which also led the second round in 2008, adds to the $25 million raised previously. Other backers include Battery Ventures, Hillcrest Management and Pinnacle Ventures.