With no walls, Quorum is a data platform that aims to provide publishers and marketers with the same level of service as walled gardens.
And they’re getting closer to accomplishing it now that they have additional cash.
Quorum announced on Thursday the completion of a $2 million seed round in which Crush Ventures and the Dudley Fund were among the participants.
The 2019-founded Quorum seeks to raise the optimization capabilities of programmatic media to a level comparable to that of closed platforms like Google and Meta.
Despite having an abundance of high-quality material, established businesses like television studios and newsrooms nevertheless struggle to compete for advertising dollars as well as attention.
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These businesses used to rely on income from more conventional sources, such as newspaper classified advertisements or TV advertiser upfronts. Currently, though, those chances are not only more difficult to find, but they can also be quickly lost in the expanse of the internet’s digital landscape.
AdExchanger was informed by CEO Ezra Doty that “the dollars are shifting away from those places and into environments like YouTube and Meta, where they’re losing dollars on ads running adjacent to things like videos of skateboarding dogs.” Not that there can’t be enjoyable content on YouTube. Simply put, it’s very different.
Having held prior positions at Universal Music Group, Turner Broadcasting System, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Doty is no stranger to the world of media publishers.
He observed firsthand during that time how newsrooms have been compelled to reduce staff; according to the Pew Charitable Trust, this has resulted in a 26% national downsizing from 2008 to 2020, with the majority of those jobs going before 2014.
Doty stated that it is not a coincidence that Google is growing at the same time that newsroom employment is declining.
He continued, “I simply believe that too much money has gone that way, and that’s been at the expense of paying people to create the content.”
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Quorum is tracking 80 million distinct mobile IDs nationally, all from opt-in, physical mobile behavior, from sources like Apple’s IDFA (Identifier for marketers) and the GAID (Google Advertising ID), in an effort to level the playing field for open web programmatic marketers.
Additionally, the business employs a hand-drawn, proprietary map of geofenced areas surrounding branded store locations, with signals determined by GPS positions and timestamps.
For improved attribution reporting, Quorum can identify when and where an iPhone user who has consented to share location data with Apple’s AppTransparencyTracking (ATT) system drives to their neighborhood Macy’s store. It can also match those IDs to other audiences.
All of the data is routed via LiveRamp and is available to all major DSPs, such as Google DV360, Xander, Stack Adapt, Adform, and The Trade Desk. Quorum has a unique pixel for measuring that functions on all platforms.
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Doty claims that this data ultimately winds up being similar to the kind that Google or Meta collect through pixels on sponsored websites—a form of data that programmatic DSPs’ pixel networks frequently can’t compete with.
Advertisers can target customers who have visited a Macy’s shop in person rather than just those who have visited the company’s homepage. They can even determine whether or not these customers watched a Macy’s advertisement on a CTV channel prior to visiting the store.
“The return on ad spend will be comparable to what you would get from retargeting the website from there,” Doty added. “It’s a really good proxy that works without the need for any cookies, pixels, or other similar files.”
With the closing of its seed fundraising round, Quorum may now use the funds to expand its clientele, which already includes numerous publishers and performance marketing agencies, and add more feature support.
Additionally, the business is refocusing on the potential of CTV advertising, which Doty anticipates will be more prominent in future always-on marketing campaigns.
Doty stated, “We want to help the creators of this great content unlock their true revenue potential because there is so much great content out there.”
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