The Elephant in the Room

By Andy Monfried, Founder & CEO at Lotame

When things are going well, there’s a tendency to ignore problems, like the quality one facing the data industry. Today Lotame is pointing out the elephant in the room. We’re not only shining a light on the issue, but we’ve invested meaningful time and money to address it.

The gestation period of an African elephant is 645 days. That’s about as long as Lotame has been working on the data quality solution we’ve recently introduced.

In the fast-changing world of MarTech, companies have the attention span of an Opossum pregnancy — approximately 12 days.

So why has Lotame made this long and large commitment to addressing the data quality problem?

The parable of the elephant and blind men comes to mind, to illustrate the challenges data buyers and sellers face when assessing data quality. Just as each blind man has his own biased view of the elephant, each market participant — publisher, data seller, media trader, brand manager, etc — sees the issue through their own lens with exposure to just a part of the whole. The definition of data quality is not the same across the board. The situational nature of data efficacy compounds the problem.

And, U.S. companies spend over $20 billion each year on third-party audience data and data activation services. Lotame has been a proponent and beneficiary of the explosive growth of the data business. With so much money and effort being expended on data solutions, shouldn’t we, as an industry, take the initiative to help define standards and push for data accuracy?

The elephantine nature of the data quality problem makes me especially proud of Lotame’s efforts. Our solution calls on resources few competitors can marshall — data science expertise, Lotame Data Exchange scale, long-standing business partnerships, and a finely honed validation process that took years to perfect.

The resulting Precision Demographic Audiences is a data set that is demonstrably superior: Tests show on-target accuracy is as much as +100% better than industry benchmarks. It’s a rare claim in a market crowded with undifferentiated products.

You can read more about our on-target Precision Audiences at https://www.lotame.com/precision-data/. Or contact us at info@lotame.com for more information.