In our conversations with prospective customers, one question we are often asked is, “How is the Quantcast Platform different from other ad tech solutions on the market?” or “Is this a demand-side platform (DSP)?” While there are several adtech tools that can be used to purchase and manage online ads, we offer a much more easy-to-use, integrated, and efficient solution for brands, advertisers, and publishers to reach audiences in an entirely new way. Let’s dive into the details.

What is a DSP?

A demand-side platform (DSP) is a technology platform that provides inventory buying opportunities from multiple sources. It utilizes real-time bidding capabilities of these sources to access and win inventory auctions. For a DSP to work, it needs an SSP.

What is an SSP?

A supply-side platform (SSP) is a technology platform that helps publishers manage their advertising inventory while maximizing potential revenues. SSPs allow publishers to manage their inventory in real time, prioritizing their own direct buys first (which nets them more money), and then uploading their unsold inventory to the ad exchanges. SSP reporting capabilities also provide insight into what inventory is selling best and at what price point. 

DSP 101: Is the Quantcast Platform a DSP?

The Quantcast Platform can absolutely do the things a DSP can do, and it also includes a host of other capabilities including:

• Fully unified planning, activation, and measurement platform for future-proofed advertising across brand and performance campaigns
• Built-in access to a unique, real-time data set powered by machine learning that turns data into insights about live consumer intent and interests
• AI built into its fabric which largely automates campaign execution to free up practitioner time so they can focus on marketing innovation
• A Brand Lift Live by Quantcast™ survey that takes in real-time feedback, allowing marketers to make quicker decisions about creative, audiences, and devices to serve on. 
• Access to cookieless inventory which expands audience reach in previously inaccessible environments
• Effortless access to audience and campaign insights: in seconds, not hours

We call it an intelligent audience platform because it helps not just the demand side (brands and agencies) but also the supply side (publishers) to understand their audiences and better monetize their inventory.

So, “no, this isn’t just a DSP” because it does so much more. Let’s dive into the details: 

• Fully unified planning, activation, and measurement capabilities. With its transformative user interface, the Quantcast Platform is easy to use and provides intuitive and interactive insights that brands, agencies, and publishers can use to drive innovation and deliver measurable outcomes. Our customers typically spend 10x less time on administrative tasks using the Quantcast Platform versus other ad platforms.
• Utilizes unique, real-time data. Today, Quantcast Measure, our publisher-side audience intelligence solution, is also used by our advertiser partners, providing them with rich, unique, and granular data from over 100M+ web and mobile destinations. Unlike stale third-party data loosely classified into packaged segments, the Quantcast Measure live data set provides you with a real-time view of evolving online consumer behavior so that you can deliver perfectly timed, uniquely relevant advertising. With our intuitive audience intelligence capability, marketers and publishers can create and analyze audiences with unprecedented speed and simplicity. By simply logging into the platform and selecting their audiences, marketers and publishers will gain access to rich insights into their customers and desired audiences—demographics, interests, purchasing habits, and more. Quantcast’s unique data and advanced machine learning algorithms give advertisers unique, in-depth audience insights on browsing interests, characteristics, and attitudinal behavior.

See this example below, comparing various game consoles. 

• Machine learning that turns data into audience insights and intelligence. our AI and machine learning engine powers the Quantcast Platform’s unique capabilities. Since the data is constantly changing and real-time, Ara can react to ever-changing consumer behavior, understand consumer interest, and infer consumer intent. To achieve that kind of intelligence and sophistication, Ara uses advanced machine learning algorithms to build custom predictive models for each campaign. In addition, we take this one step further with Ara TopicMap, which makes sense of the messy internet by analyzing content using natural language processing, and categorizing it by using machine learning to build a multi-dimensional topic map of the internet. Ara TopicMap brings scale and accuracy to interest-based audience planning and activation within the Quantcast Platform.

• Outcome-focused platform delivers performance at scale. The Quantcast Platform focuses on outcomes. You can specify campaign goals and KPIs and be confident that the platform will deliver those outcomes without manual optimizations. Ara analyzes real-time audience behaviors as well as live campaign performance, factors in campaign objectives, and autonomously tunes 10,000 variables every minute to optimally bid on each impression. 

• Access to audience and campaign insights in mere seconds, not hours. Ara uses custom-built data analytics technology that turns data into an insights playground. It queries a database of over a trillion online signals in under 100 milliseconds to provide interactive and real-time insights in the platform’s Audience Planner, Report Builder, and Insights Lab. Instead of manually pulling and combining multiple canned reports and identifying insights, you can spend your time on more strategic work, such as experimenting on campaigns and developing smarter media strategies.

We have brought together our technology leadership in measurement and audience insights, as well as programmatic advertising, privacy, and consent management, into a unified, innovative, intelligent audience platform. Our integrated approach is uniquely different from traditional DSPs, which provide limited and siloed solutions for publishers, advertisers, and brands, creating complexity and friction.

A next-generation DSP

Forrester Consulting named the Quantcast Platform as a “next-generation DSP 2.0” in a recent Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study. For the report, Forrester interviewed advertisers and marketers at leading brands and agencies to evaluate the business impact of using the Quantcast Platform for advertising on the open internet. Forrester found that when compared to traditional DSPs, the Quantcast Platform offered:

• 44% increase in customer conversions: The Quantcast Platform increases audience reach and conversion rates across display and video campaigns, thereby increasing sales and profits.
• 50% time savings: The Quantcast Platform is intuitive, easy to use, and halves the time spent by digital media team traders on planning, activation, campaign management, and reporting tasks.

Our platform makes campaign planning, setup, and execution effortless and simple, while providing campaign optimization and actionable insights with powerful AI and machine learning. We partner closely with our clients and continue to innovate to ensure our platform meets their current and future needs.