Dan Lee.
Marketers are increasingly demanding proof that their advertising is driving real results and not just metrics that look good on a dashboard, according to Dan Lee, vice-president of product management at Quantcast.
Lee, who joined Quantcast eight months ago after nearly a decade at Nielsen and stints at mobile-focused DSPs, was in Sydney meeting clients.
He said incrementality had become the dominant concern for performance marketers.
"Ultimately, what a marketer cares about is: is my advertising driving incremental conversions that I wouldn't have seen otherwise," he told AdNews.
The challenge was reconciling what a DSP reports with what clients see in their own systems — whether Google Analytics 4, marketing mix models or other sources of truth.
Quantcast was working to align its metrics with clients' preferred measurement frameworks rather than forcing them to choose between competing numbers.
Lee said the rapid expansion of AI-driven advertising tools was creating a new problem: opacity.
As more vendors offered agentic and AI-powered solutions, marketers were losing visibility into why campaigns performed the way they did.
"It's only going to get increasingly more black-boxy for customers," he said. "There is a need for marketers to still have one hand on the wheel."
Quantcast had responded by building large language model-based tools it calls Q — including Agent Q, Analysis by Q and Creative by Q — designed to surface insights into the decisions its AI was making behind the scenes.
Lee described Q as "a window into our audience graph”.
He said the company's founding investment in AI, made more than a decade ago, had been validated by the broader industry's embrace of machine learning but cautioned that LLMs were not a universal solution for programmatic advertising's complexity.
"They're not magic yet, and they're also not perfectly suited for the complexities of the programmatic advertising industry," he said.
On connected TV, Lee said clients were shifting their view of CTV from a brand-only channel to one that could contribute to lower-funnel performance.
Clients wanted to understand the halo effect of big-screen advertising on conversions — and wanted omnichannel campaigns where CTV, video, native, display and audio worked together to deliver measurable outcomes.
He said incrementality studies remained valuable but were expensive, typically requiring brands to withhold 20% to 30% of media spend for testing.
Quantcast was exploring "always-on ghost bidding" methodologies that would let clients monitor incrementality continuously without sacrificing budget.
Lee said the broader industry had taken a "breather" from the cookie deprecation panic of recent years, but the underlying shift toward cookieless measurement remained important.
Some clients who had run formal incrementality tests had discovered cookieless targeting was driving more conversions than their standard metrics had suggested.
He also flagged the emergence of AI search advertising, noting OpenAI had begun moving into advertising, as the next frontier, and one that could further entrench Google's position given its existing ad infrastructure and deep industry expertise.
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