• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 6, 2009

Imagine the insight that ad agencies and publishers could gain to target consumers if they knew the exact type of person who signed into Facebook at 8 a.m. each day to update his profile and then went to The New York Times to read the news.

Lotame has released a feature in Crowd Control, dubbed Stadium, that it believes will give advertisers and publishers insight into human behavior through social media data from sites like Facebook and others to help target ads. The application has been under development for two years.

The data originates from about 30 publishers that have partnerships with social media Web sites, according to Andy Monfried, Lotame founder and CEO. "It lets publishers take control of the data from ad networks, and allows agencies to leverage it by building non-personally identifiable profiles," he said, explaining that agencies and media planners don't get much data when initiating media buys through an ad network.

Monfried describes Crowd Control as a media delivery platform built to tap behavioral, demographic and social data. The data is used to deliver targeted ads to consumers. The platform supports one line of code that inserts in the footer or the header of Web pages on the site.

The tag collects non-personally identifiable data such as content that site visitors read. The technology allows media planners to create profiles to target customers. Monfried believes the technology will change the way media planners make buys. Rather than request 4 million or 10 million impressions, agencies will come to publishers with a target audience in mind, asking for data that matches specific characteristics and attributes.

The biggest challenge has been waiting for social media to grow up. "Getting people to understand the difference between social media and social data has also been a challenge," he said. "Segmenting and refining the data is the key to monetization of social media. It's all about what you did this morning when you signed in to Facebook. Did you update your profile and email your friends."

A publisher, for example, may want to partner with other Web sites to get better data about its users and make better ad decisions on inventories. Rather than relying on third-party ad networks, they would -- in theory -- create one of their own. Monfried calls the network a co-op because it joins together several companies to form a network.

Lotame will soon announce the names of several clients using the product. The first agency, Horizon Media, was announced earlier this week. "Leveraging data from social media is off the charts," Monfried said. "People who read The New York Times create between five and seven page views per session. People in Facebook create 63 page views per session. That means you have 63 data points on how someone uses social media to help build a better profile that you can sell to agencies."

Facebook has seen substantial growth in the United States, as well as across Europe. In April, comScore released an analysis of Facebook's growth in Europe during the past year. As the popular social networking site has increasingly focused its attention on global expansion, the site has catapulted to the No. 6 ranked Web property worldwide with 275 million visitors in February, up 175% compared with the prior year.