On Thursday, Quantcast held their Virtual NOVA event, discussing the current state of the advertising industry, the end of third-party cookies, the open internet vs walled gardens, and data privacy and consent. The event coincided with the launch of their new Quantcast Platform.

It is an intelligent audience platform powered by the company’s patented AI and machine learning engine Ara™, which aims to empower brands, agencies, and publishers to know and grow their audiences by reaching the right person at the right time.

At Virtual NOVA, Quantcast CEO and co-founder Konrad Feldman (pictured at the event) spoke on a post-third party cookie future.

“The free and open internet is a force for good…we are becoming a regulated industry.”

He described how the concentration of advertising budgets is in the hands of an increasingly limited number of tech giants, partly because advertising in walled gardens is much easier because of their access to data.

For the open internet to succeed, it needs a unifying advertising platform: “This is a global challenge for brands, so let’s think about solutions for a global stage.”

This, Feldman said, was the intention of the Quantcast Platform: to democratise successful advertising by providing advanced tech for all brands, publishers, and agencies.

The platform draws on data from more than one hundred million online destinations as one of the world’s biggest unique real-time data sets. It delivers intelligent audience insights, advertising performance, and results at scale – and also has consumer privacy and consent built-in.

                                            Quantcast Platform Browsing Interests

Chief Technology Officer for Quantcast Peter Day said at Virtual NOVA that the platform was three and a half years in the making, and had the capacity to make open internet advertising as easy and effective as platforms like Facebook.

One of the priorities of the platform is it is easy to use for marketers, so they can focus on marketing, rather than martech. The platform can intelligently plan, activate and measure campaigns in an ad.

The platform can also be augmented with first-party data from customers’ marketing systems instead of relying on third-party data.

Quantcast Platform will work through Ara, an AI and machine learning engine. Ara creates unique predictive models which interpret live data to provide an up-to-the-second understanding of audience insights and behaviours.

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.

The future of advertising and the open internet was also discussed by a live panel at Quantcast NOVA, moderated by Feldman.

It featured Nick Barnett, digital, marketing, and tech consultant, Marilyn Yeung, Regional Client Vice President at ForwardPMX, Jessica Beaton, Director, APAC Media & Digital Marketing at Disney, and Alyson Williams, SVP Digital Operations & Strategy at Forbes.

Part of the webinar’s focus was on consumer needs. In a discussion about how the industry is developing and changing, Yeung brought up the fact that after 2020, there will no ‘new normal’ because “consumer behaviours have changed”.

On the topic of cookies, and the importance of first-party data, Williams raised the point that “it’s important to keep in mind why we’re getting rid of the cookie, which is user privacy concerns.”

The discussion turned to the increasing share of ad budgets going towards walled gardens. From Williams’ perspective, publishers have to “differentiate themselves from walled gardens” by emphasising the unique offerings and audiences they have.

Beaton raised the point that Gen Z was shifting away from traditional walled gardens, so advertisers have an impetus too as well.

In a press release, Quantcast Managing Director for APAC Andrew Double said, “We are delighted to launch a unified platform that allows advertisers and media agencies to easily and fully plan and execute campaigns.”

“As third-party cookies start to disappear, Quantcast is in a unique position with our live, real-time data to help publishers and advertisers understand their audiences better.”

The Quantcast Platform is available globally for brands, agencies, and publishers.