AudienceScience, the maker of the AudienceScience Helios Enterprise Advertising Management System, has been ranked a “strong performer” in The Forrester Wave: Demand Side Platforms, Q2 2015. This Wave (Forrester’s evaluation of vendors in a software, hardware, or services market) evaluated nine companies Forrester Research identified as the most significant DSP software providers.
Regarding the global ad tech firm, Forrester comments, “AudienceScience has fully embraced being a true technology solution for marketers, and boasts a client roster that is 100% marketer direct.” When considering a DSP, Forrester states, “consider AudienceScience for its dedicated approach to serving marketers.”
Forrester is urging marketers to prepare for a fully programmatic advertising world. As the Wave states, “by 2019 Forrester expects exchange based trading to make up 30.2% of total display impressions in North America and this does not include the growth that will come from the expansion of private marketplaces and programmatic direct.”
Leading programmatic ad buyers have taken an active role in vetting technology and leading data and media strategy. Marketers who drive data and technology decisions can expect to gain levels of transparency and addressability that traditional ways of advertising could never offer. This Wave evaluates current offering, strategy, and market presence. Out of the 22 companies evaluated and the nine selected for inclusion, according to the Forrester report, “…AudienceScience has come a long way to be considered a contender in the DSP space, specifically for its commitment to only working with marketers.” Forrester also notes in the report that “with more inventory integrations, AudienceScience will be a strong marketer-focused solution that is flexible enough to be tailored to specific marketing needs.”
Most significant technology players
“We are honored to be amongst some of the most significant technology players in this space,” said Mike Peralta, AudienceScience CEO. “While our corporate strategy is vastly different and our offering is not solely a DSP, we are thrilled that Forrester recognised, in our opinion, the value an enterprise advertising management system can bring to marketers directly.”
Forrester states that even as ad technology has made great strides in providing tools to support transparency into digital media buying, the industry is still plagued by arbitrage, daisy chaining, and obfuscated ad impressions. Forrester believes that demand-side platforms must find ways to minimise marketers’ cost of buying media and that marketers must lead the charge when it comes to technology and data strategies, and that agencies and trading desks have to realign with marketers’ interests.
“Our 100% direct to marketer strategy and SaaS based pricing uniquely position AudienceScience to cultivate client-centric programmatic solutions with full transparency,” said Mark Connolly, AudienceScience CRO. “This eliminates the opaqueness in programmatic and the natural conflicts of interests that come with percentage of media based pricing models.”