Andrew Monfried’s presentation was the most interesting at tonight’s Ad Club Meetup. The founder/president of Lotame talked about advertising in social networks.

Current ad tools are outdated. ‘We rely on tools that were built ten years ago for portals.’ Monfried knows, because he helped build them as part of the early team at Advertising.com, later acquired by AOL.

Facebook is like AOL in 1998. Monfried pointed out there’s more to social networking than Facebook and MySpace, naming typical Lotame users like Bebo and Hi5.

‘In our first year we built the tools and put code in the pages of our clients,’ Monfried said. Lotame started in 2006. ‘We did it for free, but we got to see their data and they see it too.’

Monfried calls Facebook’s Beacon approach ‘a great start’. ‘It also takes influencer data, pushing that out on friends and relations,’ Beacon says. ‘I’m not sure that’s the most important identifier of relationship.’

Lotame’s approach is based on ‘verb targeting’ and ‘engagement targeting’. Monfried: ‘Let’s talk about people and behavior, not inventory.’