AiThority Interview with Peter Day, Chief Technology Officer at Quantcast

Hi, Peter. Please tell us about your current role and the team / technology you handle in the company.

I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Quantcast. My role is to empower and support our brilliant engineering and product teams and guide strategy as they build highly effective solutions for our brand, agency, and publisher customers around the world. Most recently, that included the launch of the Quantcast Platform, a new and intelligent audience platform that enables our clients to thrive on the open internet.

What is Quantcast’s greatest achievement during the pandemic phase? How did you associate yourself with this movement?

After supporting our teams around the world, our top priority was helping our clients navigate this hugely challenging year. Along with a wide range of other sectors, the publishing industry was hit hard, and we saw numerous publishers fold or be forced to seek new ways to monetize their content in order to survive. In some cases this included charging for subscriptions.

Quantcast is a champion of a free and open internet, and we believe publishers can fund quality content through advertising when they have the right tools and information to know and grow their audiences. The Quantcast Platform lets publishers understand and plan audiences, activate campaigns, and measure and report on success so they can build stronger, results-driven relationships with advertisers and win more deals.

With the Quantcast Platform, we are confident in our ability to help publishers and brands continue to grow their audiences, maximize outcomes, and grow revenues across the advertising ecosystem.

In a time when the news is an incredibly important tool for disseminating crucial information around public safety, my biggest source of pride is helping publishers like Bustle and Forbes use cutting edge AI and ML technologies to understand their audiences, monetize their content, partner with the right advertisers, and thrive.

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Tell us more about your NOVA event and how it brings together the Adtech innovations in current context of content publishing industry?

Right now, there are a lot of challenges in the ad tech industry. With privacy regulations, the phasing out of third-party cookies, and the increasing power of walled gardens, the idea of free press has fundamentally been put at risk and the industry is at a crossroads.

At our Virtual NOVA event, where we brought together leading companies like the Bustle Digital Group, Forbes, Microsoft and The Walt Disney Company, we discussed the changes underway in the world of advertising and explored ideas and solutions for 2021 and beyond. Konrad, Quantcast’s CEO and co-founder, got a chance to explain the role of advertising in the open internet, and we explored the challenges and solutions for issues like privacy, the phasing out of third-party cookies, and advantage currently wielded by the walled gardens.

Quantcast is the one of the leading AI ML applicants in adtech. Could you tell us what kind of challenges you meet in AI ML applications?

Distilling powerful AI and machine learning into easy-to-use and intuitive platforms is always going to be a challenge. More so when that technology is capturing real-time signals from across 100M destinations on the open internet. But that’s what we’ve achieved with the Quantcast Platform. Designed to unify planning, activation and measurement, the platform with its AI and ML engine, Ara™, greatly simplifies the challenge of delivering relevant advertising on the open internet, enabling advertisers to focus on marketing, not martech.

Ara, the patented AI and machine learning engine, creates unique predictive models from live data, with near instant understanding of consumer behavior. Using Ara, brands, agencies, and publishers can  automate the automatable, and focus their energies on creativity and experimentation — whether that’s refining their marketing ideas, experimenting with new audiences and campaign strategies, creating content, or monetizing their inventory more effectively.

How do working with these challenges affect customer experience and driving more revenue?

I think that every challenge is fundamentally an opportunity to improve the overall customer experience.

In crafting the Quantcast Platform, for example, we aimed to alleviate the pain points that our customers were facing around accessing timely data, integrating tech stacks, and simplifying workflows. We worked to remedy these pains by providing clients with real-time data, a convenient, unified platform, and our AI technology Ara™ – all while providing content-driven solutions in our current privacy-focused world.

We’re encouraged by the results and adoption we have seen so far, and we plan to keep innovating, transforming and bringing our expertise to the market by adapting to evolving customer needs and the changing world of adtech.

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What is the most contemporary definition of the Intelligent Automation platform that you use to differentiate solutions and services at Quantcast?

The Quantcast Platform is a new audience intelligence platform made to help brands and publishers intelligently plan, activate and measure effective marketing and advertising campaigns to grow their businesses at scale and thrive on the open internet. It provides our customers with access to one of the world’s largest, unique, real-time data sets that draws on insights from more than 100M online destinations. The biggest differentiator is the incredible AI we’ve developed to work within this platform. As I mentioned earlier, our patented AI/ML engine called Ara is how we’re helping brands, agencies and publishers understand and grow their audiences.  It identifies patterns, outlines preferences and makes predictions to help make smarter decisions and deliver superior business outcomes– and advertisers gain valuable time to focus on marketing, not martech.

Within the platform, we’ve built out privacy and identity management capabilities to future-proof for a privacy-first world without third party cookies. As we have seen recently, this future is closer than we think, especially with Google’s decision to not support industry alternatives to third-party cookies on Chrome.

Tell us about your ambitions for the AI ML market in 2021.

Our number one goal in engineering machine learning applications is to drive better results for our customers. At Quantcast, our mission is to champion a free and open internet. By putting powerful but simple tools into the hands of brands, agencies and publishers, powered by one of the largest real-time datasets and our machine learning engine Ara, we’re enabling our customers to achieve their business goals and thrive. With a free and open internet, consumers benefit from access to free quality news, information, education and other content.

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Thank you, Peter! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.