Quantcast is tapping its deep ties to publishers by linking digital data signals to offline attributes like sales and TV viewership.
The company is rooted in direct audience measurement and embeds its tags across millions of publisher pages. By looking at this data anonymously in aggregate, Quantcast can supply advertisers and publishers with intel around cross-site visitation patterns.
On Thursday it launched a new data offering called Audience Grid, which opens access to about a dozen new partners like Oracle Datalogix, TiVo Research, IRI and Kantar Shopcom to ingest Quantcast’s tag-level data and vice versa, the goal being better digital-to-offline measurement.
“It includes onboarding, data management, data quality and targeting, but we wanted to make a service that was reliable to all of our participants,” said Konrad Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Quantcast. “You’re seeing in the ecosystem walled data gardens springing up, but data is so central to everyone’s business. It is a utility. It should be open.”
Such is the logic behind Audience Grid, which promises to help marketers and media companies escape from data silos.
With more marketers adopting data-management platforms, there’s more need to augment data for actual campaign use beyond satisfying proxies at the measurement and research level, said Frank Foster, SVP and GM of TiVo Research.
“The key is getting people past age and sex demos to outcome-based measurement,” Foster said. “It makes no difference if you’re Macy’s and you’re hitting your target of 25-54 if you’re not selling more coats or shoes.”
TiVo Research, for instance, uses Quantcast’s Audience Grid to combine its television viewership data with Quantcast’s consumer data signals across a massive network of publisher properties. Thus, it might determine that a viewer of NBC’s “The Blacklist” might prefer reading Vox while those who like “The Good Wife” read The Wall Street Journal.
“The depth and ubiquity of Quantcast’s digital measurement offering was very interesting to us,” Foster said. “When you add in a very tight linkage and this one-to-one match of the television audience we offer to their digital data set, you get a great cross-platform view of an audience.”
Similarly, Wyatt Manor, VP of partner solutions at Kantar Shopcom, a division of WPP’s Kantar Retail, said Kantar’s partnership with Quantcast will help connect consumer purchases to media consumption.
“There are benefits to standardization, like we’ve seen with Nielsen and television and comScore with vCE, but there is need from advertisers to get more granular for planning purposes,” Manor said. “To understand measurement of sales lift, you may want more [nuances to] your segments, but in some cases you may need to take a subset of information and model it out more broadly to get the scale you need.”
Feldman says Audience Grid fulfills that need, since it pools together specialized data sets such as shopper data from IRI with location-based data sets from PlaceIQ and NinthDecimal, and advertisers and publishers can pick and choose as they please.
Audience Grid partner data is available free of charge to customers of Quantcast’s measurement and reporting solution Quantcast Measure.
“You don’t need to sign an expensive upfront fee to get access to that data,” Feldman said. “In a world of programmatic advertising, making large, sample-based decisions doesn’t help you understand individual impressions.”
That’s not to say that Audience Grid is a data free-for-all, said TiVo’s Foster.
Although he said his company has fielded an increasing number of requests for data partnerships from digital companies, TiVo is very cognizant of how partners use data and implements restrictions around data linkages to ensure the data it does provide doesn’t put a partner in a position to create personally identifiable information.
“We also make sure the partner is in line with our mission,” he added, which is “to shed light on multiscreen advertising and to create a more robust connection between digital and TV.”
