Lotame released a tool on Monday called Audience Optimizer, an add-on to its data management platform (DMP) that uses lookalike modeling to help clients target prospects who are most likely to respond to their ad.
The product has helped digital agency Rise Interactive, which beta tested Lotame’s Audience Optimizer over the past six months, expand its ideal targets by optimizing up the funnel, said company VP of personalization Erik Severinghaus.
“First-party data is gold for retargeting,” he said, “but we’re able to get more effective lookalike analysis to drive that into prospecting relevance.”
In the jewelry industry, for instance, retargeting someone who just bought a wedding ring is less important than understanding the kind of person who buys the ring. Severinghaus cited one retail jeweler who successfully developed new audience sets to prospect.
It’s “optimizing toward the ‘who,’” said Ray Duong, Lotame’s VP of data and insights, “whereas most campaigns optimize toward where or when an ad runs.”
Audience Optimizer is priced on a CPM model, which Duong said helps with adoption. Since customers don’t need to put in a minimum amount of spend, they can just turn on the tool and see if the incremental cost increase matches their ROI.
The service does need a commitment of a few weeks in order to develop segments and feed results back in, though it’s not a contractual requirement.
“If someone came in and said they wanted to use this for the next couple weeks for a campaign, we’d turn them down,” Duong said. “It’s just not enough time for the data to activate and for us to develop the behavioral skews.”
