Careers at Quantcast

Mission

Quantcast is a digital advertising company which aims to provide real-time advertising solutions and audience measurement services to marketers, advertisers and publishers.

History

Quantcast was founded in 2006 by Konrad Feldman (“Feldman”) and Paul Sutter (“Sutter”). In an interview with City AM, Feldman discussed how the public listing of Google stock in 2004 generated a great deal of interest in search advertising within the technology community.

This prompted Sutter to consider why targeted advertising was not attributed to browsing habits in the same way that it was being attributed to search engine history. Feldman and Sutter wished to explore this avenue further, but having no advertising experience they decided to post an advertisement on Craigslist asking to speak with people in the industry in return for $20 and a drink.

After meeting with several people, they gained an understanding of what audiences marketers sought, in terms of demographics, interests and habits. The pair began to develop a system of data collection, with tests in early 2006 identifying a number of browsing patterns. Feldman and Sutter next began designing ways to manage the data gleaned from its collection tools and provide real-time advertising solutions.

The Company attracted investors in 2007, raising $5.7 million in its series A funding round. To date Quantcast has received more than $65 million from five rounds of funding, with investors including Cisco and Polaris Partners. Quantcast officially launched its advertising solutions product in 2009 and has since added Quantcast Audience Grid to its list of services.

Benefits at Quantcast

Health insurance Dental insurance Vision insurance Life insurance Disability insurance Pension plan Performance bonus 401k Plan Stock options Maternity & Paternity leave Family medical leave Work from home Unpaid extended leave Vacation & Paid time off Paid holidays Paid sick days Bereavement leave Employee discount Employee assistance program Company mobile phone Company social events Free lunch or snacks Gym membership

Business model of Quantcast

Customer Segments

Quantcast’s customers primarily comprise advertisers, marketers and publishers that are seeking accurately targeted advertising solutions.

On its website, the Company lists a number of online publishers among its customers, including BuzzFeed, Gawker and The Telegraph.

Other clients include car manufacturer Toyota, stationer Staples, and travel company Royal Caribbean.

Value Propositions

The key value offered by Quantcast is its wealth of browsing data and the processing capabilities of its technology.

The Company uses a combination of real-time machine learning and predictive technologies to analyse data in real time, taking into account user interests, browsing habits and demographic factors, thus providing more thorough and accurate solutions for its clients.

Quantcast also provides a free data collection product, Quantcast Measure, which provides cross-platform audience measurement for mobile apps, websites, platforms and networks.

Channels

Quantcast’s audience tracking product can be accessed free of charge directly from the Company’s website at www.quantcast.com. Access to its advertising solutions and participation in its audience grid service require direct discussion with Quantcast’s sales and marketing team.

Quantcast’s advertising data can also be acquired via various advertising exchanges.

Customer Relationships

Quantcast provides a combination of self-service products and more personalised services. Quantcast’s free audience measurement product is available on a self-service basis and can be used immediately after registration and installation is complete.

Users of the Company’s audience and targeting solutions require a tailored service to suit their individual needs and circumstances, which necessitates a much greater level of direct interaction with the Company. In these cases Quantcast maintains ongoing relationships with many of its clients.

Key Activities

Quantcast provides audience measurement and data analysis services to publishers and advertisers. Through its free Quantcast Measure product it uses pixel tracking technology and browser cookies to process and collect browsing data.

It analyses this data to assess user patterns and profiles, including information pertaining to users’ age, gender, interests, length and frequency of website visits and types of sites visited. It uses this information to provide targeted advertising solutions, allowing publishers and advertisers to tailor content to particular audiences.

Key Partners

Quantcast’s partners are primarily data providers, which provide data across multiple channels, covering television, ownership information, political data, and purchase data, including companies such as TiVo Research, Oracle Datalogix, Kantar Shopcom and Experian, among others. This enables Quantcast to provide more accurate advertising solutions to its marketing clients. Until recently, Quantcast was also a partner of Facebook’s Exchange real-time advertising system where it was able to sell ad inventory, but was one of a number of companies to be let go in 2015.

Quantcast also partners with other companies operating in the digital advertising and analytics space in order to develop more efficient solutions for its clients. This includes partnerships with Israel’s Matomy Group and with tag management and data analytics firm Ensighten. Recently, the Company also launched a partnership with advertising trade association the 4As, under which they will collaborate to provide training and education resources to those within the programmatic advertising sector.

Key Resources

Quantcast’s key resources are its proprietary technology for data collection and analysis and the large amounts of information regarding user internet habits it has gathered. Despite this, there are no US patent applications registered against Quantcast’s name either as applicant or inventor.

The Company’s data and analytics partners are also important resources, helping Quantcast to provide more accurate solutions. In order to manage its data, Quantcast must also maintain reliable and secure IT infrastructure.

Cost Structure

Quantcast’s major costs come in relation to the maintenance of its IT infrastructure and its proprietary technology. This includes operating costs for data centres and the rental of server space.

The Company requires personnel to manage its data partnerships, as well as to maintain and develop its data collection and analysis technology.

Quantcast operates more than 20 offices across North America, Europe and Australia, all of which accrue fixed business costs in the form of rent and utilities.

Revenue Streams

Quantcast generates revenue through the sale of data analysis and advertising inventory. It provides free data collection tools which enable it to track user activity across millions of tagged websites and obtain significant amounts of internet data pertaining to browsing and buying behaviours. The Company’s Quantcast Measure product allows advertisers to create a profile of the types of consumers it would like to target. Quantcast is then able to identify websites that are used by that the target demographics using its data measurement technology, taking a share of the revenue from the resulting ads sold.

Quantcast also uses data to provide targeted advertising solutions directly to publishers, on a cost per impression basis, whereby customers pay per 1,000 views of a particular advertisement, as well as selling ad inventory to advertisers via ad exchanges.

Our team

Konrad Feldman,
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

info: Konrad has served as Quantcast’s Chief Executive Officer since its foundation in 2006. Prior to establishing Quantcast, Feldman functioned as Chief Executive Officer of Searchspace, a provider of terrorist financing detection and anti-money laundering software that he founded in 1999. Searchspace was acquired in 2006 by private equity house Warburg Pincus, which merged the company with Semagix to form a new company named Fortent. Feldman no longer holds an interest in Fortent, which itself was acquired by rival anti-money laundering company Actimize in 2009. Feldman holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University College London.

Paul Sutter,
Co-Founder and Director

info: Following Quantcast’s establishment, Sutter served as the Company’s President for five years, before stepping down in 2011. He retains an involvement in the Company as a member of its board of directors. Sutter previously held a number of roles in the technology and internet space. From 1997 he was the Chief Executive Officer of Transium, which was acquired by AltaVista in 2000. Folowing the acquisition he was appointed to the position of AltaVista’s Vice President of Engineering, a role he held for just over a year. In 2002 he founded computer networking company Orbital Data, of which he served as Chief Executive Officer until 2005.

Stephen Collins,
President and Chief Financial Officer

info: Stephen was appointed as Quantcast’s President and Chief Financial Officer in 2015 after serving as an independent advisor to the Company for more than a year. He also sits on the boards of marketing software company Kenshoo, civic networking platform iCitizen, and technology company Mediaspectrum, and is founder of advisory and angel investor D4D2. Collins has had an extensive career within the technology industry holding a number of executive roles, including Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Information Officer and Chief Innovation Officer. Prior to joining Quantcast, Collins was Chief Executive Officer and director software-as-a-service company Bazaarvoice. Before joining Bazaarvoice, Collins was Chief Executive Officer of Juris, a provider of legal technology software which was acquired by LexisNexis in 2007. Collins’ first senior executive role was with DoubleClick, which he joined in 1997. He was named the company’s Chief Financial Officer in 1999, and later became its Chief Information Officer. Collins began his career as an auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers.