Lessons from the Quantcast Measure Hackathon

A few weeks ago, I was able to attend Quantcast Measure Hackathon at their headquarters in San Francisco. The Hackathon is a unique, 2-day experience, that brings agencies, brands, publishers, and engineers together with one goal- solve some of the problems advertisers and publishers face on a daily basis.

Here’s How the Hackathon Worked

1. Groups of 6–8 are formed that consist of Quantcast developers and engineers, along with at least one representative from a brand or agency and at least one publisher. The engineers then interview the agencies and publishers about their main pain points when running digital campaigns. Throughout the 3-hour group discussion, each team was to come up with one main problem that the agencies and publishers both have, and how the engineering teams may be able to fix it.
2. The engineers from all groups come together and build out solutions to the problems discussed in the advertiser and publisher interviews. The teams “hack” well into the night and early in the morning, in order to present the final products to the clients (publishers and brands) the next morning.
3. While the engineers hack away, the Brands and Publishers go wine tasting in Sonoma (I’m not kidding!)
4. The next morning, the coffee-fueled engineering teams present their built out solutions to the brands and publishers to “judge.” It was incredible what the engineers could create in less than 24 hours! Most groups had built out, functioning dashboards and reports that could demonstrate how the solutions worked in real time.
5. The winning engineering team received a trophy and glory. All teams won a good night’s sleep.

Some Key Takeaways

• Reducing the gap between the advertiser and publisher and the engineers who create solutions for them can yield great results. My small group was able to come up with some time-saving ideas, reports, and products that I would use daily, in just a few hours.
• Publishers have some of the same problems advertisers do. There were two major themes in the final presentations — Ways to streamline the RFP process and ways to find and report deeper Audience insights.
• Both publishers and agencies want to reduce the back and forth on RFPs. Multiple ideas were presented on how to give advertisers more transparency into publishers audiences, inventory, products, etc. so that advertisers can make more educated decisions on who to RFP. In turn, publishers have more time to focus on the qualified RFPs and present more thorough proposals.
• Advertisers want granular audience data and performance from the publishers running their media and publishers want to provide it, but it isn’t always that simple. My publisher partner specifically spoke about wanting deeper insights into not only who is coming to his site, but what content each audience is reading, what pages are they bouncing from, what content they’re sharing on their social channels, etc. so he could sell better packages to advertisers.

Huge thank you to Quantcast for letting me be a part of the Hackathon!

Originally published at www.pmg.com on June 12, 2018.