Agency Spotlight: Quantcast
Officially launched in September 2006, Quantcast is a web-based measurement service that enables advertisers and publishers to increase their visibility through a variety of advertising solutions. The firm was started to help advertisers effectively gauge the audiences of millions of websites, and aid publishers in precisely representing their sites via direct measurements. Today, Quantcast is far more than a measurement service thanks to the recent release of a new product, Quantcast Media Program.
This service allows advertisers to create custom profiles of their desired audience and then use the firm’s state-of-the-art measurement technology to attract those type of users. You could say the new program is right on time because online marketers are scrambling to find more efficient ways to reach the fast growing community of Internet users. Though still a relatively new company, Quantcast has quickly made a name for itself as its solutions have been adopted by industry leading brands such as NBC, CBS, Fox, Hulu and MTV Networks.
To get a better understanding of what Quantcast has to offer, DMB’s Contel Bradford spoke with CMO Adam Gerber for a bit of expert insight.
How did Quantcast come up with the concept that made it the first open Internet rating service in the world?
The company believes that in a digital media economy, things work differently. In a real-time medium, actionable data that drives audience-based decision making is what differentiates and drives value. Our open Internet rating service, which delivers aggregate audience profiles on a property/sub-property basis, is predicated on giving anyone the ability to showcase or evaluate web audiences. Without barriers and without cost. We don’t think anyone in the marketplace should be precluded from delivering, or having access to audience data.
What makes Quantcast different from Alexa, HitWise and other services?
Active participation by publishers and marketers. Millions of online destinations have our tag imbedded, enabling census level traffic and audience measurement. This distribution, through our participating web publishers, provides Quantcast with a comprehensive view of the entire U.S. Internet population. We also provide incredibly detailed audiences profiles built from this collected data.
We aren’t focused on being a research company — generating industry trends and competitive reporting for the marketplace. We are focused on providing publishers and advertisers with tools that help them understand their audiences and making those insights actionable.
How do your services benefit Internet publishers and advertisers?
In order to engage online audiences and really leverage web properties, ad sellers and buyers have to be able to take immediate action on all the data that’s now available — at the impression level, in real time.
Quantcast helps advertisers understand detailed characteristics of their online consumers, find more people like them across the web, and message to these groups in real time. Publishers in the Quantcast program have the ability to deliver against this, which drives their revenue yield.
Please explain what the following Quantcast services have to offer:
Quantcast Media Planner: A tool available to anyone that allows users to rank millions of web destinations based on domain/sub-domain level audience data.
Quantcast Marketer: It does three main things — 1. Lets advertisers understand more about “who” their online consumers are by generating insights from directly measured online ad exposure, paid search activity, and brand site activity and conversion; 2. Finds larger audiences like those they’ve already engaged to extend reach. 3. Evaluate performance of digital marketing efforts from exposure to conversion.
Quantcast Publisher:
- Directly measures and reports real audience data for publishers.
- Organizes media and deliver profiles aligned with how they sell.
- Connects a publisher’s audience insights to marketer demand.
Quantcast Media Program: Media Program is where it all comes together. Once a marketer has defined their desired audience and located it across the web, he or she can buy it at scale from any participating Quantcast publisher.
In your opinion, how will the emerging web technologies change the way businesses advertise and market themselves online?
Ultimately, it will finally allow insights to be made an actionable driver of media campaigns, and messaging strategy. There are two fundamental game-changers that the web has introduced: media delivery being dynamic and the two way path. These changes make advertising much less reliant on assumption, and enhanced by actionable insights.
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