Quantcast Virtual Nova Q&A with Konrad Feldman and Dr. Peter Day

Konrad Feldman: So Peter, six months ago, we were here on this roof, introducing the Quantcast Platform. Tell us a little bit about what the last six months has contained.

Dr. Peter Day: Has it only been six months? Wow. We’ve had literally hundreds of innovations coming to the Quantcast Platform. I’m really proud of the product engineering team that have made all that real. And also the feedback we’ve got from our customers and the growth that we’ve seen has been astounding. So we’re really grateful to them as well.

Konrad Feldman: So something that must play into the plans is what’s happening post-cookies. And, of course, Google have announced a delay of two years to the deprecation of third-party cookie. Has that changed your thinking? Has it changed the roadmap?

Dr. Peter Day: Yes, sure, Google have announced their delay of two years (shock, horror!), but no, it hasn’t changed anything as far as we’re concerned. We continue to make huge investments and huge strides in helping our customers kind of navigate into the post-cookie world. You’ve already talked about, you know, our post-cookie measurement, which we’re really proud of. And I’m also pleased to announce that as of today, marketers can log into our platform and also have delivery that’s optimized for that post-cookie environment in their hands today. So you can literally start experimenting and testing and learning in that 30% of available opportunity that is today completely unaddressable using third-party cookies.

Konrad Feldman: Wow, that’s a huge opportunity. So another innovation that we announced today is Ara TopicMap, which is an advanced way of understanding the contextual structure of the internet. How does it work?

Dr. Peter Day: Right. So, I mean, we’re really fortunate these days to be able to take advantage of the huge computational advances that have been made over recent decades–and also advances in technologies, such as deep learning and natural language processing. This gives us the ability to scan the contents of the entire internet, and kind of make sense of it, if you like, and make sense of it in a really nuanced and detailed way. So that computers can kind of understand the meaning of pages by reading them. And that allows us to kind of define audiences based on the types of content they’re consuming. So we can not just say this page is about food, or even healthy food, we can even identify audiences like keto audiences versus paleo audiences versus gluten-free audiences. And this kind of thing has only been available in terms of the underlying technology for the last few years. And now we’ve put it directly in our customers’ hands by investing in Ara TopicMap, and then building tooling and technology on top of that, to allow our customers to understand, reach, and influence audiences based on this kind of understanding.

Konrad Feldman: So Quantcast Connect, this is an important new innovation that supports both advertisers, ad buyers, and ad sellers. Tell me a little bit about the thinking and the journey that led to this.

Dr. Peter Day: Yeah, I mean, Quantcast Connect is really part of a kind of holistic vision we have around kind of supply management and curation from an advertiser’s perspective and monetization from a publisher’s perspective. And really, the idea is that, as an advertiser, you obviously want to deliver outcomes from your advertising, but also increasingly, you want to be intentional with where you’re spending that money. And we’ve got a whole suite of kind of supply management tooling available to help our advertisers do that. So be that through leveraging deals they might already have in place with publishers, leveraging ‘always on’ deals that are available via the various exchanges. And then with Quantcast Connect, we’re allowing publishers to curate their own first-party audiences, basically information only they have about those audiences, but surfacing them to advertisers in the way that are discoverable, measurable, and directly activatable, which we think is a really exciting opportunity, bringing our publisher customers and our advertiser customers really close together and helping find mutual benefit.

Konrad Feldman: Sounds fantastic. And anything that we can do to continue to simplify that process of advertising on the open internet is going to benefit everyone.

Dr. Peter Day: Yeah, we think so. And the response we’ve had from publishers has been amazing. And also we’re starting to now see advertisers really lean into this and being really intentional with where they’re spending their money.

Konrad Feldman: Well, it sounds like it’s worth seeing.

Dr. Peter Day: I think so, too. So I’m going to take you downstairs now and you can actually see some of these things for yourself!