Data platform Quorum wants to serve publishers and advertisers at the same level as walled gardens can, but without all the walls.
And thanks to some new funding, they’re one step closer to doing just that.
On Thursday, Quorum announced the close of a $2 million seed round, with participation from Crush Ventures and Dudley Fund among other investors.
Quorum, which was founded in 2019, aims to improve programmatic media’s optimization qualities to be on par with what closed platforms like Google and Meta are capable of offering.
Although rich in quality content, legacy organizations like newsrooms and television studios still find it difficult to compete not just for attention but for ad spend.
Previously, these companies would have relied on revenue from more traditional sources, like upfronts for TV advertisers or classified ads for newspapers. Now, however, those opportunities are not only harder to come by but can easily be drowned out against the vastness of the digital online landscape.
“The dollars are shifting away from those places into environments like YouTube and Meta, where they’re losing dollars on ads running adjacent to things like videos of skateboarding dogs,” CEO Ezra Doty told AdExchanger. “Not to say that the content on YouTube can’t be enjoyable. It’s just very different.”
Doty himself is no stranger to the world of media publishers, having held previous roles at Universal Music Group, Turner Broadcasting System and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
During that time, he saw firsthand how newsrooms have been forced to downsize – down 26% nationally from 2008 to 2020, according to the Pew Charitable Trust, with most of those jobs disappearing before 2014.
The fact that dwindling newsroom employment coincides with the rise of Google is no coincidence, Doty said.
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“I just think that too much money has gone that way, and that’s been at the expense of people being paid to create the content,” he added.
To level the playing field for open web programmatic advertisers, Quorum is tracking 80 million unique mobile IDs nationwide, all from opt-in, physical mobile behavior from sources like Apple’s IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) and the GAID (Google Advertising ID).
The company also uses its own proprietary, hand-drawn map of geo fences around branded store locations, with signals based on GPS coordinates and timestamps.
If an iPhone user who’s opted into sharing location data with Apple’s AppTransparencyTracking (ATT) system drives to their local brick-and-mortar Macy’s outlet, for example, Quorum can not only determine when and where they did so, but match those IDs to other audiences for better attribution reporting.
All of that data is routed through LiveRamp and universally accessible across every major DSP, including The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Xander, Stack Adapt and Adform. Where measurement is concerned, Quorum has its own pixel that works within each platform.
According to Doty, this data ends up being comparable to the type that Google or Meta capture via pixels on branded websites – which the pixel networks offered by programmatic DSPs often can’t contend with.
Instead of targeting visitors to the Macy’s homepage, advertisers can target people who’ve physically been inside a Macy’s store, and can even track whether or not they saw a Macy’s ad on a CTV channel before going there.
“You’ll get similar performance in terms of return on ad spend as you would from retargeting the website from there,” said Doty. “It’s a really nice proxy that doesn’t require any kind of pixels or cookies or anything like that to execute on.”
Now that Quorum has closed its seed-funding round, it can use the money to build more feature support and grow its client base, which already includes a lot of performance marketing agencies and publishers.
The company is also turning its focus toward the potential of CTV advertising, which Doty hopes will have a stronger presence in always-on marketing campaigns going forward.
“There’s all this great content out there, and we want to help the creators of it unlock their true revenue potential,” said Doty.
