• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 14, 2009

At a time when the online advertising world seems to be shifting from an era of measuring content to one that tracks the audiences that consume it, Quantcast is making a play to shift the focus again -- this time with a decidedly brand-centric approach. Instead of aggregating audience impression data based on content, media outlets, or the profiles of individual or groups of consumers, the online audience measurement firm has introduced a product that pools it based on a brand's or a marketer's unique profile. The new service, dubbed Quantcast Marketer, is a logical counterpoint to the firm's original Quantcast Publisher service, and comes as marketers and agencies are racing to find ways of "re-targeting" coveted online users to find new, better and more efficient ways of reaching them.

"From our standpoint, this is a first of a kind solution on the Web," boasts Adam Gerber, a former Madison Avenue digital honcho who joined Quantcast as its CMO in November 2007 after stints at WPP and Publicis where he helped marketers such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever develop their seminal digital media strategies. Two years later, Gerber has helped give birth to Quantcast Marketer, the first online audience measurement service that looks at the world of online users from a marketer's perspective, and the explicit consumer profiles brands are looking to reach.

"Everyone is implementing retargeting solutions now, but they can only identify the 50-000, or 100,000 consumers that are interacting with a marketer's Web site, and then go out to ad networks and try to buy them and retarget them in a more efficient manner," Gerber explains. "We find the other 3 million or 5 million or 10 million people on the Internet who look like, or act like the 50,000 people who took an action on the marketers' site, and help a marketer figure out how they can be reached."

To do this, Quantcast Marketer essentially develops a pseudo profile of the marketer's or brand's online user base, and matches it with other comparable demographic, psychographic, lifestyle, income or purchase data that creates a much larger base of consumers from the broader Internet population.

The key to the service is Quantcast's unique tagging model, which has worked successfully for publishers, and which has quietly been implemented among 40 top marketers and agencies participating in the Quantcast Marketer beta program. Among the brands and agencies that tested the service are Lenovo, Scottrade, Kia, Virgin America, Razorfish, and Neo@Ogilvy, which Gerber said will continue to use the service on an ongoing basis.

The system works, because Quantcast already has developed profiles on 210 million Internet users drawn from its base of 10 million Web site publishers that tag their content. "That baseline of visitation, and measurement, essentially allows us to model anything," Gerber says, citing more than 100 discrete audience characteristics that can be used to hook the broad based of online users to the specific attributes of a marketer's or a brand's audience profile.

Initially, Gerber says Quantcast Marketer can aggregate those audiences across all the online ad campaign impressions generated by a marketer or a brand, including, display advertising, video, search activity, as well as a brand's site content, commerce and conversions. Ultimately, he says, Quantcast plans to evolve the Marketer service to incorporate offline metrics and behaviors that can explain the entire sales funnel phenomenon both online and offline. He says Quantcast has already begun working on such a service.