AudienceScience
Technology & Insights that Fuels Smart Advertising Decisions for Major Global Brand

Digital advertising is creating a buzz amongst business circles and for good reasons. Many of the building trends in digital advertising over the last few years have been crossing into the mainstream: real time bidding, social media as a must-have channel, online video, and mobile. The widespread adoption of these advertising options has resulted in terrific growth in the ad tech sector. These developments have escalated the global digital advertising market and have made it a $117 billion industry.

But while advertisers are spending more than ever before in the digital advertising space, many lack the transparency and control needed to make the most of their digital investments. With digital media continuing to gain importance amongst advertisers globally, it is essential that they overcome these limitations. These hurdles also include many of the misconceptions they have about digital advertising.

In order to better understand the pain points of global digital advertisers a company from Bellevue, Washington named AudienceScience initiated an investigation. At the end of their in-depth research, the company concluded that for every dollar spent on digital advertising, less than 20-50 percent goes into productive media. The reason for this cataclysm in the words of Mike Peralta, CEO of AudienceScience is “the shortage of technology involved, wrong partner incentives and a bloated supply chain with no transparency.”

AudienceScience’s Thesis

Ideally the different systems in between the marketer and the advertisement had to work cohesively. But the team soon found out that “The difference between theory and practice is much smaller in theory than in practice.” Although the different systems looked to be working cohesively on paper, it was not the case when they were implemented due to various impediments. One of the reasons was that these systems were often very different to each other. Hence, there was always a disintegrating supply chain and a lot of moving parts in between the actual advertiser and the inventory source.

AudienceScience’s research also concurred that today's marketers are under-utilizing the large amounts of personal data their customers are sharing with them and publicly every day. Moreover, with 40 to 50 percent of digital ad impressions never making it onto the customer’s viewable screen, and 20 to 80 percent of impressions being delivered more times than the advertiser intended, 42 percent of U.S. web and mobile traffic coming from web bots and not humans., there is a huge disconnect between what major advertisers think they are getting and reality.

And, they’re paying for it. 10 to 60 percent of every digital media buy went to arbitrage and service fees, not working media. Industry norms of paying agencies and tech vendors for impression volume or as a percentage of volume or media encouraged waste and opacity, not efficiency.

AudienceScience Gateway simplifies the supply chain, eliminating unnecessary and non-transparent fees

This was the reason for most digital ad impressions not having any chance to make a positive impact. The team soon realized that by looking at a customers\' activity not just on social networks but all over the web, brands can potentially engage with them in ways that are much more meaningful. When brands successfully connect with customers around the things they love, advertising ceases to be a commercial endeavor and instead becomes useful information. But while many brands use personalization techniques to reach their customers, it is often one-dimensional, isolated to a single activity or medium such as a television or social network.

There is not enough focus and emphasis on gathering and understanding all these signals that customers are sharing with the companies, either explicitly or implicitly, and pulling those things together to build a greater understanding of the customers’ need and then acting upon those things.

The key to reaching customers in this way is action, after realizing the importance of data a company should not make it an afterthought. It needs to be built into the marketing process from the beginning.

The Solution from AudienceScience

The team at AudienceScience headed by Mike put on their thinking caps and discovered a simple and intuitive means to save the millions of lost advertisers’ dollars being spent on digital media buying. They

discovered a solution that would remove the complexity, from the opaque part of your business by eliminating waste and mitigating risk. AudienceScience created an integrated audience system for digital advertising. Accessing 200 billion data insights into 386 million people worldwide, the Gateway empowers marketers and publishers with the intelligence and control to execute effective global campaigns.

Executing Advertisers could use The Audience Gateway to successfully target ads to audiences with high interest or intent to purchase their products or services. Through the gateway, marketers were able to create audiences by combining, then refining data from multiple sources such as the marketer's web site, publisher web sites, offline data and third-party data sources.

The gateway's ability to capture, store, index and combine billions of behavioral data points provided marketers with complete control and transparency when creating audiences. Combining audience segmentation, analytics, inventory access and reporting enables advertisers to learn more about their customers and continually improving campaign performance.

From Humble Beginnings to a Revolutionary Concept

As pioneers of both audience targeting and data management, in creating the Gateway system AudienceScience has rethought how brands connect their consumers, data and media. The differentiating factor was the global enterprise platform for data management, media execution, and analytics that was born out of understanding the buy and sell-side of media and having a legacy of intelligent data handling and optimization. Realizing the platform could integrate media execution and data management with true frequency capping, consistent targeting, and minimized data loss, and using it successfully for one of the world’s largest global advertisers, Mike and team knew there was tremendous potential for the technology.

Executing both data management and demand-based buying actions in a single system, Gateway enables large global advertisers to more cohesively plan, execute campaigns, get holistic analysis and attribution – or understanding what triggers generated in the best result – across display, video, and mobile digital ads. Providing full transparency into what media is being purchased and for how much as well as what sites an advertiser’s message will appear on gives big brands control. As AudienceScience Gateway is an enterprise SaaS ‘in-house’ system, the advertiser owns their data and media operations, and thus business outcomes.

The AudienceScience Gateway, also simplifies the supply chain, eliminating unnecessary and non-transparent fees while improving technology reliability, enabling global governance, and providing one system of record for digital advertising, creating accountability for every digital ad dollar.

Originally AudienceScience was an analytics firm focused on the publisher’s side. “We have really large clients in the publishing space and that allowed us to understand things like audience segmentation and data. We were the first company to come up with the idea of behavioral targeting i.e. targeting folks based on things they see and things they browse for online. This was a revolutionary concept back in the day, “says Mike. The team found that the formula was working with different publishers, but that the problem was even bigger on the advertiser’s side. Advertisers put all of the funding and energy into the space but the challenge was that they did not have the data and the knowledge around their user as a lot of that knowledge was with the publisher, with the networks or with the ad agencies. Rather than the advertiser having to go through different companies and understand the ecosystem, the idea of taking all those pieces and putting it into one system under one platform so that it became easy for the advertiser to understand who their user is and act on consistently and with perpetual improvement drove the innovation.

“For us, we took all that knowledge of audience segmentation and audience building and behavioral targeting and started deploying it in the advertising side. Since then, we have been the market leaders in the space,” adds Mike.

Continuing To Revolutionize the Industry

Today, AudienceScience is the largest and most trusted audience aggregator in the world. As an early innovator of online advertising technology, AudienceScience continues to revolutionize the industry, creating the first enterprise level Advertising Management System with AudienceScience Gateway. AudienceScience has already taken the industry by storm and will leave no stone unturned to continue to stay at the top in the times to come. Talking about the roadmap of the industry and the company Mike had this to say,"Pretty soon a lot of advertising will be in bits and bytes, which we can measure, optimize, understand and get better ROI. As this industry evolves, we move from a platform for digital to an interconnected and active system that captures everything across advertising. Just as our evolution began as a small data and analytics company to doing revolutionary things in the publishing side; we are looking to do revolutionary things in the advertising side.”