Tech Profile: Digilant

What is Digilant, and what differentiates it from other media buying platforms?

Digilant is the leading consolidated media buying platform with an innovative approach to combining semantic and behavioral targeting with custom buying algorithms. This unique combination makes Digilant the global market leader in multicultural segment targeting. Digilant provides brand marketers and agencies the solutions to achieve their goals, including brand-building, customer engagement, product introductions, competitive differentiation, direct response and demand generation. Digilant products are available as managed services or through a self-service interface. Digilant is headquartered in the United States, with offices in Brazil, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.

How should the marketing/advertising industry utilize Digilant to create better end-results for its clients’ content and online marketing strategies?

Marketers are all looking for the same thing — they want the cash register to ring, they want to grow their market share and they want to build loyalty among their most profitable customers.

What trends and changes in the market led you to realize that Digilant would fill a void?

The biggest void I see is the lack of business knowledge on the part of the vendors. The Digilant difference is the team. We have brought together some of the best minds from both the agency side and the media side of the business. Enough talk about the feature set. How can we partner with you to tackle your business problem?

What features does Digilant offer to help brands and agencies make the best online media buys?

There you go again with that focus on features. The best online marketers have a deep understanding of their customer segments and can leverage Digilant’s tools and know-how to identify profiles of people who are likely to exhibit the kind of behavior the marketer is seeking, whether that’s booking a hotel room, test driving a car or downloading a white paper.

Tell us about Digilant’s Audience Investment Management platform. What information does Digilant use to target a specific audience from the pool of all online users?

The best data is your own first-party data. Digilant integrates securely with the marketer’s DMP to identify the most profitable audience segments. There is no fear of data leakage.

What is look-alike segmentation?

NBC recently came out with a bold initiative to kill demographic targeting in favor of personas. Instead of using traditional demographics, they’ve combed through the data to define archetypes of how people consume their news. That’s the concept of look-alike segmentation.

What is power retargeting? What kind of personalization does Digilant offer advertisers that other platforms do not?

Standard retargeting is a waste of ad dollars. The definition of retargeting is sending an ad to a user who has visited your web site. Your brand is already in that consumer’s decision set. Marketers need to identify audience segments that resemble those users and target those people with messages that are likely to resonate and create the kind of actions they consider a measurement of success.

How do you see audience targeting technology evolving in the next three to five years?

We foresee drastic consolidation in the tech industry. Nobody needs 15 exchanges or 50 data providers. There is no clear difference between any of the technology platforms and there is no clear exit for any of the remaining independent vendors. The players who will survive are the ones who understand the customer and their business problem.

As CEO and co-founder of Digilant, Ed Montes is responsible for planning and implementing the company’s strategic direction, overseeing international operations and delivering on the company’s vision. In 2010, Ed was awarded LatinTRENDS Magazine’s Latino Trendsetter Award in the technology category. In 2011, he was named one of Boston Business Journal’s Top 40 under 40.

Prior to becoming the CEO at Digilant, Ed served as the manager director for Havas Digital, NorthAmerica, where he was recognized with the Media All Star award by MediaWeek in early 2009. Ed has also worked for Yahoo! Inc. and was a prosecutor in the Middlesex District Attorney’s office of Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Boston University School of Law and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.