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Quantcast Media Buying Program Lets Marketers Find “Lookalikes” across the Web

Quantcast has announced the launch of a new media buying and selling solution which the company says is addressable on the impression level, allowing marketers to buy precisely the audiences they want, based on targets defined by their own audience data.

Here’s how the Quantcast Media Program works: the solution applies marketers’ unique customer interaction data from their media campaigns, search activity and brand website visitation to discover the distinctive audience characteristics of their most valuable consumer segments. Look-alike models then identify larger, similar consumer groups across the web. Marketers connect with publisher inventory to purchase these audience definitions, in real time, at scale.

“We show you who is clicking on your ads, browsing your website and purchasing your products,” the Quantcast website explains. “You buy an audience of millions - even tens of millions - who look like them using Quantcast.”

“Advertisers ultimately want to deliver the right message to the right audience, and this system allows us to provide an even greater level of granularity and targeting capability across our broad range of quality content,” says Peter Naylor, svp of digital sales at NBC Universal. “We are pleased to be working with Quantcast to help add that additional insight and value for our clients.”

Addressability is the future of advertising, says Ed Montes, evp and managing director of 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.” Havas Digital has been testing the service for the last two months.

Quantcast claims its Media Program has “extensive industry adoption,” affording visibility across more than 10 million web assets, including sites, blogs and videos. “Collectively Quantcast’s participants engage all 220 million U.S. internet users (and over 1 billion people worldwide) through 180 billion web-based activities every month,” a release states.

Quantcast’s new media buying service allows the advertiser drive audience segmentation, rather than having the audience segments determined by the media supplier or third-party tech firm, the way other targetable audience segmentation works, writes ClickZ.

For example, an automaker, with help from Quantcast, might tag its own site to discover the demographic or psychographic characteristics of its most valuable customers. Then Quantcast would identify the larger group of people with similar characteristics across the web.

Quantcast only represents a subset of the web - no portals have signed on yet, nor has Google, AdAge points out. Still, its media buying offering includes many top publishers that either don’t use ad networks or have played down their importance. Time Inc., for one, says it will use Quantcast because it allows marketers to “cut horizontally across our properties to find similar audience targets at scale.”

Quantcast started out as an audience-measurement service, at first measuring sites too small to be measured by panel-based services but now measuring more than half of the top 100 ad-supported sites.