Guardian signs up to Quantcast to offer advertisers better targeting

The company is the first major publisher in the United Kingdom to use Quantcast Brand Lookalike targeting. The tool identifies the unique characteristics of an advertiser’s target audience through predictive modelling in order to find other consumers across the web that match these profiles.

Through using this product, brands can effectively reach the people most like their best customers and publishers can combine their premium content with audience targeting to match their inventory to an advertiser’s audience.

Tim Gentry, revenue director at Guardian News & Media, says, “Building brands effectively has always been about communicating with the right people in the right context, so we’re delighted to be partnering with Quantcast to help us deliver precision targeting of our progressive audience to advertisers.”

The Guardian and the Observer announced yesterday that it had lost £44.2m last year as investment in digital publishing – including iPad, Facebook and Android apps – contributed to a deepening of losses at the papers which could not be offset by the double-digit growth in digital revenues. The papers had seen a 16.3% improvement in digital revenues to £45.7m. Of that total, digital advertising was up by 26% to £14.7m, with other digital revenues coming from services such as Soulmates dating.