AudienceScience has always been in the business of firsts: from being the first DMP for publishers to the first behaviorally-targeted ad network. We’ve seen tremendous growth in the digital advertising market and radical changes in how technology impacts buying and selling. Through it all, however, something hasn’t been quite right. For all their investment online, large global brands have lacked the tools and transparency needed to spend more than 5%-8% of their media budgets in digital. Intermediaries and arbitragers have prospered while brands (and consumers) have struggled to find value in digital advertising.
In fact, we find that for every dollar an advertiser spends, 50-80% gets whittled away through waste and intermediary fees, leaving brands stuck with little of what we call Productive Media Quotient – the percentage of a marketer’s media budget that directly reaches the intended person, at the right frequency and in the desired place.
For the past year, we’ve been working closely with some of the world’s largest brands to maximize Productive Media Quotient and to eliminate waste and excessive fees through total transparency and advertiser control. Today, we’re announcing that AudienceScience is solely focused on a new first and dedicating the entirety of its resources to its global SaaS-platform for marketers, AudienceScience Gateway.
What does this mean for AudienceScience going forward? We’ll continue to support our strengths in these key areas:
- A technology built for the marketer. Agencies are critical partners for marketers, but ensuring full transparency and maximizing Productive Media Quotient across multiple brands or business units on a global scale means marketers need to take ownership of their enterprise digital marketing technology. We’ll continue to align our product and services to the needs of marketers, empowering them to make the most out of every dollar.
- A truly integrated system for data and media. While it seems theoretically appealing to “separate church and state” and manage data and media separately, practically, technical disconnects between systems and subsequent data loss only result in more waste and operational inefficiencies. We operate a unique, integrated system today and our first-hand experience tells us that this approach maximizes efficiency and effectiveness for marketers.
- A global solution. Major brands in North America, Europe, LATAM and Asia are already executing through the system and we’ll continue to invest in our best-in-class global technology infrastructure to support large global marketers.
This decision to focus on supporting marketers through technology also means we’ll be closing our ad network business as of January 1, 2013. Networks have had an important role in the industry, but ultimately networks and trading desks obscure marketer spending to the advantage of middlemen, not the marketer. Being able to support greater transparency for marketers makes this an exciting time for AudienceScience and our clients. We look forward to sharing more in the weeks ahead.
