• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 23, 2012

Wednesday Lotame will launch the Unifying Data Management Platform for publishers and brands. The Unifying DMP changes Lotame's flagship product, Crowd Control, into a series of tools to collect and organize multiple data sources to trigger events.

The new product gives publishers a view into customer data to create audience targeting segments, personalize content based on user interest, as well as understand loyalty and engagement of consumers across a variety of platforms.

Aside from managing mobile Web data, the platform integrates discrete audience-based data from a variety of first- and third-party sources, such as mobile apps, behavioral and demographic data, Web analytic tools, CRM data, point-of-sale data and other offline data sources. 

Publishers can now target ads across platforms. Kalyan Lanka, director of product development at Lotame, describes the process as having the ability to collect social influence data or interests of consumers both on desktop and mobile to target across platforms.

Conde Nast and another publisher have been testing the platform.  The biggest problem for mobile has been the lack of cookies. Apple and BlackBerry devices do not allow advertisers to drop cookies in their browsers, so targeting users become challenging. Companies have begun to look for proxies -- identifiers -- instead.

"Personalizing information for users means knowing as much as you can without violating privacy rules,"  said Lanka. "You can only accomplish loyalty when the brand or publisher knows a lot about the user."

How do publishers or brands know their customers without encroaching on privacy? Today opting-out is specific to a device or browser, but in the future Lotame plans to change that.

A few months ago Lotame began testing a universal tag to collect and manage user behaviors, demographics, interests and actions from desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones. Modified versions of the tag can also pull in data from CRM systems, analytics tools, set-top boxes and other offline databases.