Media planning and buying has suffered from a lack of scale and no reliable connection to real-time delivery. But a new approach to determining audience value just may provide the "customized ubiquity" that marketers have been seeking.

When analyzing consumer behavior, publishers have few options for packaging and monetizing their audiences, as they traditionally struggle to clearly define those audiences based on the raw traffic metrics at their disposal. And buyers are equally challenged, as they must rely on aggregated historical data to evaluate the value of a property's audience, rather than direct measurement of interest and intention. Neither strategy accounts for a real-time marketplace, nor have they offered much success in scaling audiences to deliver maximum value.

In a presentation at the iMedia Brand Summit in Colorado Springs, Quantcast Chief Revenue Officer Todd Teresi outlined a new approach to audience delivery -- one focused on helping buyers and sellers quantify the real-time characteristics of digital media consumers, against which they can activate appropriate advertising solutions.

"Until now, scale has been the albatross -- we haven't been able to get to the point where we can provide both massive and targeted exposure. That's what Quantcast tries to do," Teresi said. "The question is how do we take info from transactional data, turn it around, and enable you to use it at scale?"

Quantcast aims to deliver highly accurate audience profiles for millions of web properties by combining directly measured traffic data with multiple audience-based reference points. The company's "connected decisioning" methodology captures a comprehensive understanding of more than 220 million U.S. internet users. As a result, Quantcast can deliver detailed profiles of audience demographics, affinities, and site behavior, even for audiences as small as 500 unique visitors and regardless of how the content is distributed or syndicated. Armed with this information, publishers can more effectively package and monetize their audiences, markets can better identify and target their best-performing customer segments, and media buyers can make better decisions to support their campaign strategies, according to Quantcast.

Transacting audiences, with scale and control
Teresi explained that most media planning today is about look-back, as buyers evaluate a publisher's property based on aggregated historical data and audience proxies that can't be validated until after campaign delivery. In contrast, Quantcast profiles hand-raising purchasers by tagging banner campaigns, paid search, product and information events, as well as user conversations. This enables it to generate accurate audience profiles based on real customer interactions and, thus, identify consumer behavior at both the demographic and 'site-o-graphic (event behaviors measured against aggregated user behaviors) levels.

"We focus on how to enable you with data. It's an effective way to get targeting at the top of your funnel," Teresi said.

Jodi Harris is senior editor at iMedia Connection.