• by Gavin O'Malley , June 29, 2009

Until now solely an audience measurement service, Quantcast on Monday launched a product for advertisers to better define and buy audiences online. By incorporating impressions from any site on Quantcast's radar, the Quantcast Media Program is offering advertisers a scalable way to define target audiences via their own "data insights," and apply this custom segmentation throughout the buying process.

The product, according to Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman, "brings the essential qualities of search marketing to display."

"This new solution enables scale and end-to-end consistency in media planning, buying and delivery," he said.

Taking customer interaction data from marketers' media campaigns, search activity and brand site visitation, the new product endeavors to help marketers discover the distinctive characteristics of their most valuable consumer segments.

Typically, marketers buy audiences and behavioral categories defined by publishers and ad networks. Quantcast, however, is offering them the opportunity to use their own data to define their target audience, and then to buy it directly in real-time.

Successful or not in its new venture, the San Francisco-based startup is addressing marketers' fundamental goals. "Advertisers ultimately want to deliver the right message to the right audience," said Peter Naylor, SVP of digital sales at NBC Universal, which has agreed to deploy the new service.

Said Ed Montes, EVP and managing director at Havas Digital: "By defining audience segments based off our own unique consumer engagements, we are able to obtain a much clearer view of our consumer and to have confidence that our messages are reaching the right audiences."

Presently, Quantcast has "visibility" across some 10 million Web "assets," including sites, blogs and videos. Collectively, Quantcast's participants engage all 220 million U.S. Internet users through 180 billion Web-based activities every month.

Launched in 2006 as an aggregator of audience impression data, Quantcast more recently introduced a product that pools data based on a brand's or a marketer's unique profile.

For the Quantcast Marketer beta program, its unique tagging model was implemented among 40 top marketers and agencies including Lenovo, Scottrade, Kia, Virgin America, Razorfish, and Neo@Ogilvy.