Connecting the Marketplace - Announcing Quantcast Media Program

Publishers have long been using Quantcast to accurately measure and describe their audiences. More recently, Marketers have gained access to rich insights regarding their valuable consumer targets.

Today we launched Quantcast Media Program to connect Marketers and Publishers using consistent, actionable and accurate data applied at the impression level. A first for the industry.

Now, Marketers can access audiences of millions who look like their most desirable consumer - in a uniform way, at scale, across the industry's leading online publishers.

Quantcast Media Program provides advertisers with the first scalable way to define target audiences via their own data insights and apply this custom segmentation consistently throughout the buying process. Publishers are now able to provide improved inventory packaging and expand the range of advertisers they can effectively serve.

See what AdAge had to say.

And what leading buyers and sellers think:

"Advertisers ultimately want to deliver the right message to the right audience, and this system allows us to provide an even greater level of granularity and targeting capability across our broad range of quality content," said Peter Naylor, Senior Vice President, Digital Sales, NBC Universal. "We're pleased to be working with Quantcast to help add that additional insight and value for our clients."

"While the future of advertising is addressable, Quantcast takes this concept one step further by giving the advertiser control over defining their own consumer segments and consistently applying those definitions across media outlets," says Ed Montes, EVP and Managing Director, Havas Digital. "By defining audience segments based off our own unique consumer engagements, we are able to obtain a much clearer view of our consumer and to have confidence that our messages are reaching the right audiences."

Learn more about Quantcast Media Program today!

TiVo and Quantcast Bring Marketers Cross-Platform Audience Analysis

Advertisers and media companies are constantly searching for better ways to evaluate advertising effectiveness and media consumption across platforms. Today, we announced our partnership with TiVo to bring the advertising marketplace an innovative TV and Internet audience reporting solution to provide cross-platform insights on an unprecedented scale. This new solution is the most comprehensive cross-platform media analysis solution available for correlating television viewership and online activity.

The TiVo/Quantcast partnership marries television viewership data from TiVo's 35,000 household-strong opt-in Power||Watch™ rating panel and directly-measured data from Quantcast's innovative direct measurement offering. The unique approach will deliver unprecedented insights on the overlap that exists between TV and online audiences and the effectiveness of TV advertising at driving specific downstream online actions (and vice-versa).

At Quantcast, we are focused on helping advertisers and media companies improve their understanding of real-time audiences, so that addressable advertising solutions can evolve, and this new partnership is a critical part of that effort. 

You can find more details on the offering at the TV/Online Advertising Effectiveness overview and to inquire about using the service reach out to us directly.

Quantcast Launches New Tools for Marketers, Enables Enhanced Customer Segmentation

Today, we launched Quantcast Marketer - a free service we've had in closed beta for the past 6 months. It's a significant addition to our product offering, and provides marketers - for the first time ever - the ability to easily obtain valuable demographic and interest-based insights about their customers as they are exposed to advertising and/or interact with content or functionality on brand sites.

Most importantly, Quantcast Marketer enables these proprietary insights to be used to identify where larger groups of similar consumers can be found across the Web - a significant improvement over the widely used "retargeting" tactic, which limits a marketer's ability to reach only those customers who have actually visited a brand site.

Premier agencies (Razorfish, Neo@Ogilvy) and marketers (Lenovo, Kia, Scottrade and Virgin America) joined over 40 participants in the Quantcast beta program, representing product categories from CPG, Financial Services, Travel, Automotive, Technology, and Education. You can explore case studies here.

If you are a marketer or agency, you can begin using Quantcast Marketer today by completing this form.

Thank you to everyone who participated in Quantcast Marketer's beta program. We look forward to receiving continued input now that it is available publicly.

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Another Quarter, Another Milestone

Just in time for the close of Q1, our Quantified Publisher program has hit another milestone surpassing 6 billion impressions in a single day for the first time on March 26^th, 2009.

That's over 164 billion impressions in the proceeding 30 days, and all of that with the industry's fastest measurement tags.

A big thanks to all of our Quantified Publishers!

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Pixel performance that beats Nielsen, comScore, Omniture and even Google

Part of Quantcast's commitment to our customers is a program of continual development in our core technology infrastructure – lower latency and better availability makes for a happier consumer experience. The latest independent tests of our service show performance levels that clearly lead the industry.

Recently, our global network of data centers passed an important milestone – recording over 100k media consumption events per second at peak load. While our volume has increased massively, we've also been able to improve the performance and we're pleased to provide the latest pixel performance results from Gomez, a leading independent provider of web experience management solutions.

February 2009 performance results from Gomez show Quantcast delivering a US mean pixel response time of just 40.04ms. That's 1.86x faster than Google, 4.60x faster than Omniture, 4.88x faster than comScore and whopping 8.37x faster than Nielsen. 

Click here for more details.

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100,000 events per second!

That's the number that our Quantified Publisher program surpassed at 9:14am PST today. 100,000 media consumption events every second from the millions of web destinations that participate in our program, totaling one third of a Terabyte of data every hour.

Yes, we know it's geeky, but it takes a lot of engineering to support this load with the fastest tags in the industry and we're proud of it: 13 global data centers, dynamic failover between data centers (in under six seconds!), sub 40ms average pixel response in the US and super high availability (even better than Akamai).

(For those interested at 9:14 our Washington DC data center had the highest load, closely followed by our two European centers, with Chicago just beating out New York for 4th place.)

Most importantly, we could never have hit this milestone without the support of you, our participating Quantified Publishers, and we want to thank you for trusting us with your audience.

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Over 4 Billion Served, and Growing...

Earlier this week we surpassed an important milestone, over 4 billion measurements in a single day. These measurements relate to media consumption activity on the millions of web sites, blogs, videos and widgets that have chosen to participate in the Quantified Publisher program. It is by combining all of this data that we’re able to provide the rich audience profiles you can find on quantcast.com and the more we measure, the better all that data becomes.

So, to all our Quantified Publishers, a big thank you! Below you can see our growth over the last 18 months, and in case you were wondering – the running monthly count is now over 100 billion.

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Quantcast Names Digital Expert TS Kelly to Lead Media Research Initiatives

Earlier today we announced that TS Kelly has joined Quantcast as Vice President, Media Research. With his deep understanding of the media industry and research community, Kelly will be instrumental in keeping Quantcast at the leading edge of media research and measurement, ensuring continued value creation for the many publishers and agencies that rely on our services.

Kelly brings both traditional and interactive media experience paired with broad research, planning, sales and marketing capabilities to his new role at Quantcast. He joins us after over 15 years in the media research industry, where he has held positions at Clear Channel Communications, NetRatings, Doner Advertising, IAG Research and most recently, as SVP, Director of Global Research & Insight at Havas Digital.

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A Web Measurement First – Modeling Cookie Counts to People

Today, Quantcast publicly released the internet’s first cookie corrected direct-measurement audience model (press release). This is a transformative event for measurement of digital media, as it enables census-level, cookie-based traffic counts to be leveraged as the foundation for people-based audience evaluation. More importantly, this hybrid audience measurement model combining cookie data and people insights will provide the needed foundation for addressable advertising.

For over a decade, online audience measurement has been limited by legacy panel based models. Our breakthrough announcement today sets the stage for dramatic changes in how our collective media business operates. We firmly believe that as the advertising and media business moves to an addressable model, direct-measurement will be a foundation for real-time targeting.

We have released a Cookie Correction Audience Data White Paper describing our methodology, and have provided a wide range of information detailing how audience data across our service is improved with today’s enhancement (Cookie Corrected Audience Overview & FAQ). Many of your questions should be answered by these resources.

We look forward to receiving feedback from our community of users, and continuing to lead innovation in the audience measurement space. As always, comments are welcomed at contact@quantcast.com.

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MRC Accreditation Process Initiated by Quantcast

Today, Quantcast publicly confirmed its commitment to a important industry review – the Media Rating Council’s accreditation process. The MRC (which was established at the recommendation of the U.S. Congress) has been an integral part of reviewing and accrediting 3rd party audience measurement in the TV, Radio and Print mediums (among others) for almost 50 years.

While Nielsen and Comscore have initiated the accreditation process as well, no online measurement service has yet to receive MRC accreditation for their data.

George Ivie, Chief Executive and Executive Director of the MRC noted, “We are excited to engage with Quantcast – a company that has introduced a new measurement approach – in the auditing process, and are pleased by their interest in working with us so early in the growth of their business.”

The process that we have begun is expected to be completed in a number of stages, and will be overseen by the MRC’s Internet Committee and involve an audit by an outside CPA firm chosen by the MRC.

We are eager to move forward with the process and provide yet another benchmark of transparency and confidence for the traffic and audience data that we generate. Taking this step sooner rather than later is a commitment to our rapidly growing publisher and marketer communities that we intend to deliver them credible services. More broadly, it is a sign that as the only open, direct-measurement audience service, we will innovate in ways that support and enhance existing industry expectations.

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