UPDATED 15:14 EDT / APRIL 28 2011

Clearspring Serious About Big Data, Makes Audience Platform “Portable”

Clearspring’s been building its big data strategy for a couple of years now, and as it seeks new verticals in the marketing industry, Clearspring is releasing another major feature for its product line up.  Giving companies the ability to take their target demographics with them across platforms, Clearspring’s new “Audiences Everywhere” feature brings some 200 million U.S. users to top demand-side platforms and ad exchanges.  It’s an extension of Clearspring’s Audience Platform, launched at the end of last summer, expanding beyond Clearspring’s own network.

What Audiences Everywhere does is enable brands to take their audience groups, which could be formed around various demographics in Clearspring’s database, and port them to their preferred DSP or ad exchange network.  It removes several barriers for data portability, freeing companies from marketing in a limited fashion to certain groups based on the platforms they use.  With this development, Clearspring’s making the target demographic groups agnostic, so they can travel with publishers and advertisers across various platforms.

Brian Lesser, SVP and General Manager of the MIG said, “Clearspring is a key data provider that brings differentiated audiences by leveraging a combination of scale, micro targeting, and social data that is valuable and hard to find in combination.”

Sticking to this cloud-driven approach, Clearspring is leveraging its proprietary real-time data processing engine to aggreate and synthesize anonymous influence and intent data.  It’s in large part thanks to the AddThis platform, which Clearspring acquired a couple years back.  It’s proven a strategic buy for Clearspring, as AddThis’ web presence has helped to build the company’s real-time capabilities, learning a great deal about end user activity, and providing clients with the insight they need for relevant targeting.

Combine this with Clearspring’s massive reach (reportedly over 1 billion uniques monthly), and you can see why an advertiser might be interested in Clearspring’s platform.  Reaching users at the right time and place is going to be a central aspect of marketing in the coming year, and real-time data exchanges are at the heart of this movement.

Clearspring’s building out its ecosystem, with varied dynamics and multiple platform support.  As advertisers develop relationships around different platforms, it’s important for Clearspring to allow clients to sync their audience groups with their platform of choice.  Advertisers can buy influencers in different channels for their platform, parsing out the initial data sets to their highest benefit.

Of course, real-time bidding is a key aspect of this, and it’s a tactic that’s being applied to several data-centric and marketing companies right now.  Nexage has updated its ad exchange with its own spin on real-time bidding, while Citrusleaf incorporates real-time bidding into its behavioral targeting technology.  A recent PubMatic study reflects the advertising industry’s changing behavior around real-time bidding, noting the shift in buying methods around new targeting capabilities.

For Clearspring, things are coming together nicely for the emerging market.  “We’re positioning more and more in the big data space,” Hooman Radfar, Clearspring CEO tells me.  “We’ve been building this for some time.  There aren’t a lot of companies that reach over 1 billion uniques, have a platform, and the processing capabilities we have.  We’re squarely positioned for this change, and the advertising piece of the ecosystem is just one part of our long-term goals.”


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