Before I get started, and in the interest of full disclosure, our company is in the business of providing a data management platform to publishers, advertisers, and just about anyone else that may benefit from one. Our product, Crowd Control, is a powerful online data management system that has served as the infrastructure for our brand focused online media and data business for over four years.
Some of our competitors in this market espouse the virtues of a “pure platform”, and more to the point, the pitfalls of an offering from a company like ours. The point they are trying to make is that a company that has both a licensable SaaS product and a media network poses a conflict of interest and is a dangerous option for those in the market for a product to manage their own data. We obviously could not disagree more vehemently, and believe quite the opposite to be true. In fact, I’d be hesitant to ever recommend someone use a product offered by a company that they themselves do not use and rely on. Would the iPhone be so successful if Steve Jobs walked around with a Blackberry? Would Salesforce be the force that it is if they internally managed their own relationships using their email address book and spreadsheets?
Clichés are clichés for a reason, and at Lotame we eat our own dog food… and it sure is tasty.
To make things real, here are a few intangible benefits we see for using a product and partnering with a company that is already battle tested from running a business for over four years:
- We have built much of our learning into the product, so you don’t have to relearn the same lessons. We know which features and capabilities are purely eye-candy and marketing speak and which make a difference to your business on a daily basis. Skip the fluff and start making money.
- Our network background provides the ability to offer functionality that is simply not possible with a silo’d product. As just one example, we can bootstrap your data sales through our data network, all with the flip of a switch and no additional deployment or work. When your own data efforts are scaled up, we can simply flip the switch back off. It’s a perfect way to get your feet wet in the data industry with very little work on your part.
- We’ve seen it all and are here to help. Having run a media and data network business, we’ve run across just about every trafficking and operational scenario you can imagine … and we love to share and make all of our partners smarter.
And that’s not even to mention any of the awesome capabilities of the system itself.
As many web companies start to evaluate their data management and monetization needs, I encourage everyone to look past the marketing speak, past the and scare tactics, and simply ask their own questions about where they want to go and what their real needs are. Only then can anyone truly identify the partner and product that best meets those needs.