• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, November 13, 2007

Former Brightcove executive Adam Gerber has joined Internet ratings service Quantcast as its chief marketing officer, and will open the San Francisco-based company's New York City office.

In his new role, Gerber is charged with leading efforts to establish Quantcast as a legitimate player in an online ratings market dominated by Nielsen Online and comScore Media Metrix. It's also vying with a newer crop of Web measurement services including Alexa, Compete.com and Hitwise.

Long-standing dissatisfaction with the accuracy of online ratings has created an opening for Quantcast and other newcomers. Publishers maintain that the panel-based measurement systems used by NetRatings and comScore habitually undercount their traffic. Ratings services counter that publisher Web logs are unreliable because they may double-count users who appear as new visitors after deleting their cookies.

Working with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, NetRatings and comScore earlier this year agreed to open up their ratings methods by allowing technologies and processes to be examined by a third-party auditor.

Quantcast aims to offer a more accurate alternative by combining both methods: gathering data from panel-based research and publishers' server logs before using a proprietary algorithm to develop detailed profiles of Web site audiences.

The company's Quantified Publisher program allows any size publisher to participate for free by tagging pages. Quantcast plans to eventually make its money by matching advertisers with target audiences, in effect creating an audience search engine.

"Clearly, revenue is the goal of any company, but we see our immediate need as building out our system," Gerber says. "Once we've scaled that and proven the sophistication and accuracy of our data, we believe there are a number of extensions of that business that will offer us tremendous revenue opportunities down the road."

Ultimately, the company plans to extend its measurement beyond the Web across digital devices including set-top boxes and DVRs.

So far, some 20,000 publishers are using the free service including high-profile sites such as Answers.com, TheNation.com, MIT, Gawker.com and The HuffingtonPost.com. But Gerber says the Quantcast platform is especially well-suited to underserved "long-tail" sites, "who have not had good ways to surface audiences to the media-buying marketplace."

Over the next few months, Gerber says Quantcast plans to roll out an upgraded version of its service offering more in-depth analysis on multiple sites in real-time.

"Agencies need a tool that lets them identify a particular audience they want to reach and have a wide variety of choices reported back to them," Gerber explains. To help Quantcast connect with media buyers and planners, Gerber is launching the company's New York outpost, which he expects to employ about six research and marketing staff members, including himself, in the next six months.

"We've already taken office space and are looking at expanding with a number of disciplines focused on helping agencies and publishers to better leverage audiences," says Gerber, who spent 15 years at traditional and digital agencies including WPP's Digital Edge (now MEC Interaction) and Publicis' MediaVest unit before joining online video company Brightcove in 2005.

Since leaving Brightcove, where he served as vice president for advertising products and strategy, in July, Gerber says he'd been working on several consulting projects, including one for Quantcast.

He views connecting advertisers with targeted audiences as the next big thing in media. "I believe media will become an addressable business over time," he says. "Not just the Web, but TV and other media. We'll be buying audiences directly. I believe the next decade is all about figuring that out."