Online advertising technology company AudienceScience announced its new AudienceConnect product which “pairs premium publishers who wish to optimize yield and maintain content quality with top-tier advertisers and agencies seeking to associate their brand with select publishers to dramatically increase conversion and overall advertising effectiveness,” according to the release. Read more.
CEO Jeff Hirsch talked about AudienceConnect and its positioning in the market.
AdExchanger.com: Is AudienceScience Connect more of a demand-side platform (DSP) or an ad network? How will you differentiate?
JH: It is neither; it is actually a new concept we are calling a media transaction platform (MTP). AudienceScience Connect is powered by our Audience Gateway, the leading global DMP, and is a platform that enables a direct relationship between premium publishers and advertisers. DSPs focus on the demand side of the equation and SSPs focus on the supply side, whereas Connect provides a workflow solution that allows for transparency and control on both sides and simplifies the media buying, and especially audience buying, process.
Publishers continue to be concerned that their data is being mis-used by buying and selling partners. How does AudienceScience Connect address this? Do you see this as a competitor to publisher side platforms?
AudienceScience has always been committed to absolutely protecting the rights of publishers to control their own data. For that matter, this is true of advertisers as well. This is NOT a new concept to us, as we have provided a DMP to over 100 premium publishers in 20 countries and have been doing so since 2003. AudienceScience Connect addresses the publisher concern by opening up the entire media buying and selling process. It gives publishers transparency, and moreover, control, over who is using their data and how, and at what price.
Why start in Europe with the platform? And, was this technology part of the Wunderloop acquisition? When does this roll-out in the U.S.?
We started in Europe because that is where the platform was developed and first implemented. This technology was developed by Wunderloop, the German company recently acquired by AudienceScience. The US launch is happening now, with the formal announcement to be made Tuesday November 2. The key difference is that the product we are launching now has been integrated into the Audience Gateway to put the power of data management and AudienceScience’s legacy of targeting experience behind it as well.
Where will you source your inventory? Will you source any of it from exchanges and aggregators for the platform?
That’s the interesting part of this system. It is a workflow platform that allows advertisers and publishers to create their own relationships. With that, the inventory comes from those publishers who are participating, either at the behest of their advertiser clients or in their own efforts to build virtual private premium networks.
Will real-time bidding be a part of the platform?
Although AudienceScience has extensive capabilities and experience with RTB, Connect is first focused on providing something that is not currently available in the market – a premium buy/sell platform that is designed to address guaranteed inventory placement.
By John Ebbert
