• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, February 22, 2012

Lotame plans to announce Wednesday the launch of a platform that optimizes audience segments against campaign goals. The platform, Goal-driven Optimized Audiences (G.O.A.L.), analyzes the behaviors of consumers each time they see or respond to a campaign.

The platform relies on insights, combined with first- and third-party data, to optimize audience segments. The technology learns from past interactions, analyzing click-through rates as it collects data.

Targeted Victory plans to use Lotame's data management platform to gather, manage and activate data across its political campaign network this year, including Mitt Romney's. The technology can bring offline information, such as voter registration data, online in a way that Lotame execs believes keeps personal data relatively private.

David Rowley, VP of ad operations at BlogHer, had so much faith in G.O.A.L., he adopted it without running complete tests. "The platform didn't have enough time to produce statistically relevant suggestions for improving the campaign, but I believe it would have been just a matter of time," he said. "I know it will work. We just don't have documented cases."

G.O.A.L. shows achievable performance for a campaign at varying levels of audience size. It attempts to eliminate false targets. When asked how Rowley justified ripping out the company's old platform to put in Lotame's audience-based optimization tool, he pointed to the way BlogHer sets up campaigns. It relies on search terms for the majority of targeting the company does. The prior tool the company used didn't offer the same data requirements to optimize against campaigns based on intent or behavior. It is one thing to target by audience, but another to get the best performance out of an audience-based campaign. That's more difficult, he said.