• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 14, 2024

Lotame Curation launched Wednesday to provide advertisers with an updated way to build audience segments based on emerging technology -- even as media buyers struggle with addressability, reduced visibility of valuable inventory, and pricing and efficiency constraints.

As the industry moves to curated audiences, issues that make it difficult to achieve campaign goals will resolve, says Eli Heath, senior vice president of global addressability at data solutions company Lotame.

Although measurement remains a challenge, Lotame “really had to flip the script in how we look at audience targeting to make it work,” Heath adds.

Traditionally, the audience is sent to a demand-side platform (DSP) such as The Trade Desk as a large file of IDs and corresponding targeting criteria such as “in-market for automotive” or “households with an annual income of more than $150,000.”

In the “flipped” version, Curation pairs the media with the audience segment and packages it into a private marketplace, and then deploys the targeting and the media together from the supply side rather than the demand site.

“It’s a big paradigm shift in programmatic targeting,” Heath said. The change in process addresses signal loss and challenges with cookies by pairing the media with audience segments.

It also increases benchmark performance -- as shown while testing the system with an unnamed client that increased efficiencies by 20% and video completion rates by 15%.

Lotame has been using supply-side platform (SSP) targeting all this time and relying on cookies for the past couple of years, but based on fundamental shifts in the industry, the company’s developers have changed their thinking.

The product has been in the works for about 18 months, about the time Heath joined Lotame. He has been advocating the shift of business to private marketplace curation.

“We will still see third-party cookies in Chrome, it’s just a matter of when we have a total blackout,” he says. “The good news is this curation works well with Chrome.”