Quantcast announced today advertising agency veteran Robert Horler will manage and reshape the audience insights and analytics company as its new chief operating officer. The former CEO of Dentsu Aegis US will report to Quantcast founder and CEO Konrad Feldman and serve on the company’s board of directors.
“The reality is we’re probably at the end of the beginning of sort of real data-driven marketing,” Horler said. “A business like Quantcast, as it scales and has aspirations to crash through the billion dollar revenue mark and keep going, requires a different set of skills and a different set of capabilities to its management team.”
Both Horler and Quantcast chief marketing officer Steven Wolfe Pereira, who joined the company in September, described their appointments as Quantcast “growing up,” and the company’s new approach as “back to basics.”
Horler, who is also taking on a substantial amount of power in the day-to-day running of Quantcast, said Feldman recruited him for his skill in running and scaling large organizations. “At the end of the day, Konrad is the founder and the CEO,” said Horler, “but I will run the business, and he will focus on the product and technology, which of course is where his skills lie.”
The company’s goal is to combine its investments in real-time online analytics and artificial intelligence with a renewed focus on audience insights and client relationships.
“The marketing industry has gotten it all wrong on data, on ad tech, on mar tech,” Wolfe Pereira said. “We’ve poured all this money into these shiny new objects, but guess what? We have a growth crisis. Companies aren’t growing.”
A single-minded focus on data, regardless of source or quality, said Wolfe Pereira and Horler, hasn’t generated enough insights from that data, and too often ignored brands’ needs and the bottom line.
“We need to focus on customers and creativity, spurring growth in the AI era by using machine learning to inspire human learning,” Wolfe Pereira said.
Quantcast also relaunched its website and announced a new “Question Everything” campaign today, touting these principles and “educating the industry,” according to Pereira, on where the company believes data-driven marketing is headed.
The reorganization and marketing push are part of a near-total rebrand that Quantcast has undertaken in the last three months.
