• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 23, 2023

Lotame, a global technology company, on Monday launched what the company calls a next-generation data platform to accelerate first-party data -- whether companies have it or need it. It's called Spherical -- and it's all about data interoperability.

With Spherical, marketers and media owners can drive the most value from known and unknown first-party data for customer engagement and acquisition.

“We’ve rebranded and expanded our technology as Spherical,” said Alexandra Theriault, general manager of Spherical, which is powered by Lotame. “It’s a business unit that supports the revenue side of Lotame’s business and go-to-market strategy for products.”

Spherical defines the company’s business strategy. Theriault says company executives are still working to define and understand how the business unit will identify growth opportunities, new capabilities and integrations.

"The goal is to help customers," she says. "This is an opportunity to make their job easier."

The focus is on data interoperability and working with companies once recognized as rivals.

The platform will extend first-party data that lives in data warehouses or customer data platforms (CDPs) into the madtech ecosystem.

CDPs integrated with Lotame at the launch of Spherical include BlueConic, Meiro, mParticle, Rudderstack, Salesforce, Simon Data, Tealium and Treasure Data. 

Lotame plans to expand support to additional CDPs on an ongoing basis.

Digital consumption continues to increase across a variety of channels, creating an abundance of data. This data, however, resides across multiple platforms, making it expensive and difficult for companies to unify and activate. This is further complicated by third-party cookie deprecation, privacy regulations and walled gardens.

Nine in 10 CMOs -- at 91% -- cite access to customer data as a competitive advantage.

Yet 89% of CMOs say customer data is not readily available to them, per The CMO Council research. Lotame data shows that although satisfaction with CDPs is very high among marketers and publishers, there is still room for improvement.

The next-generation platform enables brands and media owners to drive growth through actionable customer intelligence, data-informed audiences and identity-powered activation regardless of restricted, cookie-enabled or authenticated environments.