AudienceScience announced last week that it is closing its ad network business - as it looks to focus on becoming the SaaS solution of choice for large, brand-focused advertisers.

This is a pretty significant move by AudienceScience, given that it could mean that one particular global advertiser, who has an already extensive relationship with AudienceScience, is going all in with them for global digital buying. For AudienceScience to develop a unified proposition of this kind, it would suggest that the strategy is being driven by the needs of existing large, global clients.

Will AudienceScience achieve what every major vendor has been attempting over the past 12 months? Brand spend has been the holy grail for everyone connected with ad tech of late. Buy-side operators need it to drive overall spend growth in RTB and sell-side are increasingly focused on it because common perception is brand spend equals higher CPMs.

With the exclusion of the likes of Kelloggs, big brands have not thrown their lot in with programmatic, with many still confused and unclear as to what programmatic brings to the table. A key reason for this might well be that there is still lots of convincing to be done around the notion that display advertising can be a true demand generator.

You could also argue that premium advertiser spend remains weak in programmatic due to the lack of solutions that address the specific needs of brand spenders. AudienceScience now seems to be positioning itself as a genuine programmatic solution for premium. And the strategy seems to be working as far as the largest global brand spender is concerned.

ExchangeWire caught up with Mike Peralta, President, Audience Science to get some deeper perspective on what the change means and what the new focus will be.

The news that you shuttered your ad network in the US perhaps doesn't have the same weight of 'news appeal' in Europe. But what are the fundamental implications of this for yourselves as a business?

MP: AudienceScience is now dedicated exclusively to building and selling our technology platform,which integrates data management functionality and digital campaign execution capabilities. The US network business played an important role in the development of AudienceScience and many of the learnings from that business have influenced the technology decisions we’re making today. Through our time in the ad technology space, we’ve seen that large global marketers are woefully underserved by the industry, which has evolved mostly to enrich intermediaries and obscure waste. With that in mind, the opportunity to grow our SaaS solution for these marketers is a massive one and we want to make sure all of our resources are aligned in that direction.

Does this mean you're now moving to become more buy side focused? What will be the value proposition for brands?

MP: We’re focused on working directly with large global brands to help them eliminate what we find to be excessive waste in their digital media buys. Waste comes in many forms, from poor frequency management, to out-of-target impressions, to intermediary fees based upon a percentage of media spend. We want the brand to have full transparency into where every part of its budget goes and to give brands the tools to make smarter media decisions through data.

How will your engagement with publishers change? Will you still be provisioning technology to publishers to enable them to sell their own audience targeted inventory sets?

MP: We’ll continue to engage with publishers as technology clients. Digital publishers can use the AudienceScience platform to segment their audiences for audience-based ad selling and to facilitate data sharing and monetization with advertisers, agencies, and other publishers. It’s also important to remember that many digital publishers – especially the larger conglomerates –
are also large advertisers in their own right. These publishers will find value from both the buy-side and sell-side capabilities of the AudienceScience platform.

What's the key differentiator versus a traditional DSP with DMP type capabilities?

MP: Our platform is built as a truly integrated system that can manage both audience data and media. This means bringing best-in-breed DMP functionality to the table – with the requisite ability to integrate, segment, and manage 1st party, partner, and 3rd party data – and having that data live in the same system as media execution to minimize data loss and allow for closed-loop optimization of data and media. Most vendors today either manage data and media in separate systems – with all the ensuing operational and technical challenges – or simply lack true data management capabilities.

How is this different to a brand consolidating spend into one 'classic' ad network like Advertising.com? Data management, inventory procurement, targeting capabilities, aren't these all ad network-esque qualities? Or is the key difference transparency?

MP: Impression-level decisioning and the ability to apply first-party data are important factors, but transparency is absolutely the biggest differentiator (and one that’s enabled by our SaaS-based pricing model). Unfortunately, true transparency is far from the norm in an industry where most programmatic buys run through multiple black-box DSPs via a trading desk (or multiple trading desks if an advertiser operates globally or has brands with different agency relationships). In fact, it’s hard to see how this now-common model is all that different from the fragmented ad network buying model of 5 years ago, albeit simply with more acronyms and an even more complex supply-chain.

If the strategy of working direct with large brands enables AudienceScience to access global demand, then expect Audience Science to emerge as one of the ad tech behemoths when the inevitable consolidation comes.