• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 15, 2012

Census-based online audience giant Quantcast is continuing to expand and diversify with new audience analytics products aimed at the burgeoning programmatic, “audience-buying” marketplace (a.k.a. RTB, or real-time bidding). Its latest development, which is being released today, is dubbed Quantcast Advertise for Branding (QAB), and it is a self-serve platform enabling advertisers, agencies and publishers to connect “big data” with discrete brand targets.

The new system, the company says in a blog post, will establish “a new level of transparency for participating publishers and advertisers and allows them to transact directly based on specified audiences.”

QAB is part of a progression of developments by Quantcast to make its audience measurement data more actionable in the transactional marketplace, not just as a media planning tool, but for real-time buying.

Quantcast’s systems combine both census-based tracking of publishers’ audiences with advanced predictive modeling techniques to identify and match audience segments to specific brand targets. QAB effectively enables advertiser, agency and publisher users to tap directly into those data and analytics in real-time.

The system, for example, can help advertisers or agencies identify which sub-segment of a publisher’s total audience most directly matches their own audience targets, or it enables a publisher to carve out the portion of its audience that matches those targets so there is little waste, duplication or irrelevant audience reach.

The system can express these targets either as a brand’s own custom audience segments, conventional demographics, or so-called “spendographics,” a term developed with consumer packaged goods sales data modeler SymphonyIRI for linking brand targets to actual product purchasing behavior.

Quantcast says several major publishers, including Warner Bros., AccuWeather, SAY Media, and Adap.tv, have already begun using QAB to fine-tune the way they sell their audiences to advertisers and agencies.