Lucky participants chowed down on delicious South Western fare, and digital media-inspired drinks. After a few “social media signature cocktails,” I engaged with the lively crowd.

Ammon Brown of Traffiq had quite a few things to say about the improvements being made in the Bing algorithms. Venk Varadan of Citadel Securities revealed his expectations for the VC side of the business, and his thoughts on the future potential of mobile advertising. I overheard some agency folks discussing the challenges of last-click attribution, with the best approach to finding the right clicks hotly debated.

The weather held steady, the alcohol flowed and the conversations were passionate and informative. Thanks to TRAFFIQ and their partners for yet another great online advertising event.

Also the leader of Lotame’s previous $13 million round of investment, Emergence was joined by existing investors Hillcrest, Battery Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures. In addition, Lotame secured a line of growth capital funding from Pinnacle. Lotame has received $34 million in funding.

The latest round of funds will primarily go toward building a Platform Sales Group that will assist publishers in selling audience data beyond their own sites. Bolstering this effort are two new hire: Bruce Budkofsky, vice president of sales, and Andrew Bradway. Budkofky previously held the position of sales director for Comcast Interactive while Bradway was senior sales leader at MetaCafe. Lotame CMO Eric Porres is also transferring to the new department to serve as vice president of business development.

One of several companies singled out by The Wall Street Journal’s headache-inducing “What They Know” series on online data collection, Lotame is also a launch partner of the Open Data Partnership by the Better Advertising Project, alongside 33Across, Bizo, BlueKai, Demdex, eXelate, SafeCount and Turn.

“Previously, a handful of Internet and tracking firms, including Google, Yahoo, BlueKai, Lotame and eXelate, made such information available on their own sites. However, few consumers were aware.”

What’s the point of that second sentence? All I see is a lame accusation that these companies are making it difficult to get away from their clutches.

Granted, if people opt out of data collection, BlueKai, Lotame and company will have less to sell, but being publicly labeled data spies presumably would have a more negative effect on their business.

Oh wait, they kind of already have been called online spies by the WSJ — however, it seems their businesses aren’t slacking because its obvious to those in online marketing that the “What They Know” series is transparently drumming up paranoia to drive page views and newspaper sales.

What would be good enough for WSJ? Google has written plenty of blog posts on the subject and Yahoo just published an look at consumer privacy controls as part of an extensive examination of Right Media quality control.

Would television commercials do the trick for WSJ’s Internet privacy bloodhound gang? Door-to-door demonstrations of how to opt out?

What I find irritating about most media coverage of this space is the attempt to turn data collectors into villains when their practices are completely legal and they’ve offered olive branches to consumers. There are bad apples in every bunch, but the “What They Know” series’ only real revelation has been a programming screwup at Facebook.

Could data collectors and targeting companies do more to promote transparency? Of course, and it looks like they’re going to have to with the Federal Trade Commission recommending a “Do Not Track” list.

But why is the onus completely on the data collectors? What is the browser’s responsibility in understanding the workings of data collection on the Internet? There are many tools currently available to concerned browsers for curbing tracking, and the Open Data Partnership will likely improve the options.

I’ve long argued that the tradeoff for all those nice services you get on the Internet is that advertisers get to try to sell you stuff by guessing what you like based on your browsing history.

I don’t know if I can sum it up better than DScriber: “If you didn’t know that as you surf the Internet, companies may be collecting all sorts of information about you, shame on you.”

Shine Group Chairman and CEO Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert, and former Bebo CEO and AOL executive Joanna Shields are creating a content company that will combine TV production and social media. [AllthingsD]

Alliance Health Networks has closed on a $3.3 million Series C Preferred Stock financing led by Highway 12 Ventures. EPIC Ventures, Series B lead investor, also participated in the Series C round along with other leading Internet and healthcare industry angels. Alliance Health has now raised a total of $6.6 million in venture capital.

Definition 6, has hired Kevin Smith as vice president of sales. Smith will lead the growth and expansion of the interactive agency’s sales organization, including both its Atlanta headquarters and New York office. Before joining Definition 6, Smith was a principal for Matrix Resources. Smith also held various positions with Capgemini Consulting, IBM and PriceWaterhouseCooper.

Lotame, a data-driven marketing platform that combines social media interaction with tracking data, has partnered with with Dimestore Media. Dimestore provides a multiple-question survey platform to measure campaign return on investment with advertiser-defined metrics such as increased intent to buy, brand awareness, primary message retention and brand attitudes. The agreement gives Lotame the ability to collect an unlimited amount of survey data and provides real time access to the collected user level data so that it can be incorporated into Lotame’s own reporting at any time throughout a campaign.

The results from a recent Lotame study showed the effects of exposure to a campaign on a person’s intent to view an entertainment offering. The study revealed a “bell curve” in the correlation of intent to view and time spent viewing ads for the offering. This effect was noted on a per-ad and per-campaign basis, indicating that advertising to any person increases the likelihood that he or she intends to watch – but only to a point – after which likelihood actually decreases.

The study, conducted on live digital campaigns for a variety of entertainment offerings from December 2008 to March 2009, showed that a measurable increase in a person’s intent to view begins at 17 seconds over the course of a campaign, peaks at 76 seconds and significantly degrades after 225 seconds. For any single ad, impact is felt after 2.4 seconds, reaches its peak at 40 seconds and degrades after 113 seconds.

According to Scott Hoffman, CMO of Lotame, by focusing budgets on bringing a well targeted audience into the ‘sweet spot’ of exposure, entertainment-industry advertisers can measurably improve their return, freeing up budget to reach more people or realize savings.

In the study, ads were considered “viewed” when at least half of the ad was viewable and the browser was in active use. Exposure was measured by Lotame’s Time Spent technology, which allows advertisers to design campaigns around time-based metrics. “Intent to view” was determined by individual surveys conducted by Lotame partner Vizu. Vizu’s Ad CatalystSM was designed to increase brand marketers’ confidence in online advertising.

Lotame counts the time that a user actually spends viewing an ad without counting time when the ad is obscured, minimized or scrolled out of view. By accurately monitoring and combining the time each user spends with the ad in plain sight, Lotame can measure the actual impact on the desired audience.

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Stadium is the first ad delivery platform, powered by social data, to be made openly available for use by any company looking to improve the precision and performance of online ads. It leverages Lotame’s Crowd Control targeting technology to give partners direct access to a wide range of tools for delivering, measuring and analyzing online ad campaigns.

“The metrics typically used by the advertising industry all aim to determine how well a message was conveyed to people who matter,” Andy Monfried, Lotame CEO, said in a statement. “Stadium eliminates guesswork by only reaching people who matter, and goes beyond that to determine exactly how the message was received and if it created the desired effect.”

Lotame says the platform gives agencies like Horizon Media the power to direct campaigns to custom audiences via data partnerships with preferred publishers, in essence creating their own ad networks. Using Stadium, Horizon can form a richer connection to publishers, enabling Horizon to create audiences on the fly based on attributes and behaviors that matter most to specific brands. Horizon is the first advertiser to use the Stadium platform.

For the last two years, Lotame has powered campaigns for over 100 name brands. Each campaign relied on anonymous data to selectively advertise only to the people who were most likely to care. During that period, Lotame has served ads for campaigns supporting more than 100 brands, including leaders in consumer packaged goods, entertainment, financial services and telecommunications.

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But brands do have a window, according to research done by Lotame, a company that provides solutions within social media. Lotame had run ads for a major jar peanut butter brand targeted exclusively to users on its network who had been exposed to content about a salmonella outbreak, either through conversations, articles, or other user-generated content. Over that period, February 20 to March 11,  custom surveys were served to this target audience measuring purchase intent to determine the effectiveness of the campaign’s ads at raising user intent to purchase for the brand of peanut butter.

Based on the results of the campaign and the analysis conducted on users who saw ads and responded to the purchase intent survey, Lotame determined that the campaign was able to effectively drive increased intent to purchase for the brand peanut butter among users aware of the salmonella outbreak. Lotame also learned that the window of opportunity for doing so effectively is roughly the six weeks immediately following the initial outbreak.

“After a certain period of time, people stopped caring about the situation,” said Robert Jones, one of the authors of the study. “The overall strategy worked, trying to reach users quickly after the initial storm of press around the salmonella outbreak. I think the message that the advertiser was using in this case was a very quick ‘to all of our customers our brand is safe’ message. And I think targeting users exposed to those conversations was the right way to go.”

Jones did note that a different or stronger message might have been needed with bloggers, because according to the Lotame data, while users with blog interests were among the most likely to click on ads for the campaign, clicking on ads had little to no effect on user purchase intent. Users with blog interests just may not have responded well to the particular message presented by brand peanut butter, despite having a great interest in reading it, according to Lotame.

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Mindshare will use Lotame’s Time Spent online ad platform in support of a campaign for a national mobile telecommunications network. Time Spent technology regulates ad delivery to an audience defined with Lotame’s proprietary Crowd Control platform, Lotame said. Crowd Control provides the means to define audiences by traditional demographic information as well as by areas of interest demonstrated by participation in social media. Time Spent essentially removes a commonly cited flaw of display ad measurement – the fact that an impression may not make an impression.

“Brands and agencies have reacted to Time Spent as though a light has been switched on,” said Andy Monfried, CEO, Lotame. “And in fact, that’s what we are doing. We are shedding light on how ads are received by the targeted audience. The online advertising community has come to accept that impressions are the primary measure of value, but we are showing that it is possible to put a value on the Internet user’s time.”

Lotame recently announced it closed $13 million in series B financing to support its product offerings and business development efforts.

Babelgum’s CEO Michael O’Callaghan is leaving the company, PaidContent is reporting. O’Callaghan’s departure is part of a general trend at the online video platform: it’s seen new CEOs, CTOs and COOs in 13 months. No word yet on where O’Callaghan is headed.

Tribal Fusion has welcomed Toby Gabriner, the former CEO of Adzilla, as its president.

“This new investment from Emergence amplifies the immediate opportunity for Lotame given the firm’s investment leadership and acumen in the digital advertising marketplace,” said Andrew Monfried, CEO and founder, Lotame. “Another important piece of this event is the addition of Emergence’s Jason Green as a respected and pivotal team member to our board. His deep expertise and understanding of how to achieve our goals, having helped companies such as Ask.com, DoubleClick and Avenue A grow from early stage companies to prominent icons of digital advertising, is extremely valuable to Lotame at this time.”

The company’s premier product, Crowd Control, is a targeting toll that the company is marketing to advertisers and agencies. It’s designed to enable brands and agencies to target audiences that have demonstrated recent interest in topics relevant to the campaign.

In addition to general information offered by users of social media during registration and interests implied by the sites the users visit, Lotame anonymously collects data points on users’ social media participation – such as posting pictures, commenting on blogs or watching a video. The product capitalizes on the fact that 40% of Internet use is on social networks, the company said.