Hi, Ingrid, please tell us about your role and the team / technology you handle at Quantcast. How did you get here?
As CMO of Quantcast, I lead a team of marketers that help grow our brand awareness, support our business growth, and engage our community of customers worldwide. Ultimately, my team is responsible for evangelizing to the broader digital advertising and publishing community: We reach brands, agencies and publishers to illustrate how the Quantcast Platform, powered by its advanced AI and machine learning engine, Ara, can help them know and grow their audiences.
Prior to becoming CMO of Quantcast, I served in similar roles at companies that were also focused on helping customers gain business value from massive data sets – specifically, using that data to support AI, ML and Big Data analytics applications.
Prior to Quantcast, I was CMO at H2O.ai, the open-source leader in AI. Before that, I was the CMO at Hortonworks (now part of Cloudera), which developed and supported open-source software enabling organizations to manage and process big data so they could derive meaningful insights from it. These experiences prepared me to help Quantcast given its strong foundation in massive data and AI. We are transforming customers’ digital advertising efforts and helping publishers better understand and engage their audiences.
How did your role evolve through the pandemic months? How did your previous experiences with technology management help you scale your efforts and meet unprecedented challenges?
I joined Quantcast in November 2020. The company had adjusted like many others to working remotely and finding new and creative ways to engage our customers. Obviously live events weren’t an option so we’ve successfully run a number of global virtual events so our customers can stay informed with the latest developments both at Quantcast and in the industry.
In March we launched the new Quantcast Platform with a series of three virtual regional events. We were joined by an audience of thousands to hear from brands such as Christie’s, Equifax and Microsoft, agencies Dentsu and MediaCom, and publishers Bustle and Forbes on the future of online advertising from the deprecation of third-party cookies and driving greater efficiency to, finding new customers and helping their businesses grow.
We will begin holding in-person events again once circumstances allow it, but we’ll also rely more on hybrid events going forward.”
Tell us more about your marketing technology stack and how has it evolved in the last 2-3 years?
We like to eat in our own restaurant so, from an advertising perspective, our adtech is the Quantcast Platform. It’s very easy-to-use and outperforms any alternatives we’ve tried in the market.
In addition to our own platform, we use a number of martech offerings including Marketo (engagement marketing), SplashThat (event marketing), and Hootsuite (content marketing and social media). One of the key elements we look for in tools is whether they can help us speed up the process to get our sales team in front of our prospects and customers.
What is the most contemporary definition of ‘effective advertising’ in 2021? How are these standards different from web, video, social and audio channels? Could you throw some light by providing references from your available case studies?
For me, the definition of effective advertising in 2021 is the same as it’s always been: advertising that directly impacts and accelerates business goals.
What counts as effective depends on the brand, the audience and the objectives. That’s one of the reasons that we’ve seen such a positive response from the launch of the Quantcast Platform. It delivers incredible insights based on real-time data from more than 100M online destinations. No matter what industry or stage of growth our customers are in, we can help them better know and grow their audiences.
For example, one of our customers, Christie’s Auction House, used the platform to rapidly shift the company towards digitization which was crystallized in the cutback of its printed catalogs over the course of the pandemic. This marked a big change for the 18th-century auction house which was then able to present automated ads digitally to a new set of clients that they otherwise would not have reached.
How is Quantcast redefining the ‘future of advertising’? What unique adtech solutions do you offer to your customers?
Quantcast champions a free and open internet. We are leveling the playing field for brands, agencies and publishers and eliminating the advantages currently wielded by Big Tech’s walled gardens. To achieve that, we give advertisers the insights they need to reach the right person at the right time, and do it in a way that protects user privacy.
In March, we introduced the Quantcast Platform, an intelligent audience platform. Drawing on data from more than 100 million online destinations, the Quantcast Platform operates on one of the world’s largest unique real-time data sets, delivering intelligent audience insights, advertising performance and results at scale. With consumer privacy and consent built in, the Quantcast Platform enables businesses to thrive in a privacy-first world and achieve time savings, cost efficiencies, deeper insights and outstanding business results.
The Quantcast Platform is powered by Ara, our patented AI and machine learning engine. Ara creates unique predictive models that interpret live data to provide an up to-the-second understanding of audience insights and behaviors. It queries a trillion data points to deliver precise insights in a highly intuitive, interactive, and instantaneous experience. Ara automatically adjusts thousands of parameters to drive the best outcome for every ad. Essentially, Ara frees up marketers’ time to delve into audience psychographics, analyze campaigns with intuitive visualizations, and experiment with new audiences, creatives and campaign strategies.
The platform can be augmented with first-party data from customers’ marketing systems. With the ability to intelligently plan, activate and measure campaigns in a single, unified and easy-to-use platform, advertisers gain valuable time to focus on marketing, not martech.
As a CMO, how do you keep your own company protected from the negative online comments and remarks? What kind of tools and solutions do you currently use to manage online brand reputation?
Like most brands today we keep a close eye on how we’re perceived on the major social media platforms and in the press. I’ve found that, no matter the brand, being transparent in how we work, having a strong culture, knowing what we stand for and then living up to those standards are some of the most important things when it comes to maintaining your reputation.
The cookie countdown is sweeping all-time tested marketing and advertising / user targeting campaigns. How should advertisers plan for the new era in a cookieless economy?
The coming demise of third-party cookies is an opportunity to improve the way we function as an industry. Brands will need an alternative method for identifying users to support effective advertising campaigns; it is advertising that provides vital funding for publishers. There is a frothy mix of alternative solutions emerging which could be confusing for many. That’s one of the reasons we’re hosting regular webinars for our customers and publishing educational content to help them navigate these changes.
It’s important to remember, though, that effective online advertising has always meant identifying patterns and trends in a wide variety of information sources, and AI and machine learning have been central to that for years. That’s where Quantcast is very strong and we’re helping our clients navigate this change.
Tell us more about the hiring trends in the ad tech industry. What kind of talent / skills do you hire for in your company to lead Product and Marketing goals?
AI and Big Data are transforming the ad tech industry, and I think that’s being reflected in hiring trends. At Quantcast, we look for people who have a track record of effectively using data to drive better business results, whether that be in the form of a marketing or advertising campaign. Experience in adtech or martech is a plus on our team.
Tag a person from the industry whose answers you would like to see here:
Patrick Hall, Principal Scientist, bnh.ai
Thank you, Ingrid! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.
Ingrid Burton is CMO at Quantcast. In addition, she serves as an independent director at Extreme Networks. She has several decades of experience leading global marketing teams to build brands, create demand, and engage and grow communities. Ingrid was recently CMO at H2O.ai, the open source leader in AI and machine learning. She has also advised several startups as a brand and demand expert, including DriveScale, Paxata and MapR. Prior to her advisor roles, she served as CMO at Hortonworks.
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