Quantcast Reviews

Pros

Extremely challenging problems and landscape. Highly effective teams with great momentum. Industry leader in technology and solutions for marketers and publishers. Long standing track-record of building world class technology. Company is growing and positioned well for acceleration.

Cons

2015-2018 were hard years, company is still healing from them. Lots of legacy remains, though it is being actively addressed. Ad-tech has a target on it's back, regardless of if it should.

Advice to Management

Continue on the current path, it seems to be working. The executive leadership team seems a little sparse at the moment. Engage the public and legislative discourse around digital privacy and targeted advertising, digital targeting is useful and not scary in the way Quantcast does it.

Pros

One of the best places I had an opportunity to work at and was able to pick up on a whole set of new skills. The biggest thing going for Quantcast are some of it’s passionate employees. This is the one place were I found everyone around me to be super smart and we learnt from each other. Most people are super collaborative and were happy to help each other. At Quantcast ownership is highly valued and appreciated. You also get enough freedom and autonomy to innovate. Great engineering culture, grass roots level hackathon events. Great strides have been made in the pivot to being a self service ad tech platform

Cons

I think my only issues was we weren’t moving fast enough and there wasn’t a compelling story for path to liquidity.

Advice to Management

Consider rewarding your tenured employees by providing an option to liquidity

Pros

Lot to learn. Nice culture

Cons

Engineering is managed by folks who are there for several years.

Pros

Nice people. Interesting Problems. Impressive tech stack.

Cons

Questionable future. Average compensation at best.

Pros

free food, free snacks, free coffee, city centre location, nothing else

Cons

A lot of them: obsolete systems where you have to do everything manually, communication is zero (they know and they won't care), not open to feedback, not open to improve, useless training with no time to learn, error ratio is absurd unless you are a computer

Advice to Management

The company has potential but unless you learn to be open to feedback, open to improve, replace obsolete systems and unless your training improves by a lot and, you give proper support, I don't know how long you'll last. Also communication is a big issue. Is well known but it's being justified instead of improving it. I've never worked in a place where there is 1000% ambiguity and you cannot trust anyone's work because of communication issues.

Pros

People: Hard working, wicked smart, minimally jerky, collaborative attitudes Products: We offer it all. DR & Brand products, various creative formats (display, video, native, internal designed creative s), targeting off proprietary first-party data plus ability to work with DMPs & custom audience providers. Food: catered lunches, daily breakfast items (cereals, fruit, etc), company meeting breakfasts, monthly happy hours, and other random events. Fun: ping pong, pool table, arcade game, PS4 (XBOX?) room, quarterly team activities Phone: Monthly stipend for phone bills + $ to help expense a new phone (every 2 years) Maternity/Paternity Leave: In addition to time off, $ to help w/expenses, ramp back period for primary caregiver (moms who deliver), specific rooms (plural) for pumping

Cons

People: Some Quantcasters don't realize how lucky we are to be at a company full of people willing to help one another. I've observed time & time again isolated incidents where people are desperate to hit their goals in sales, product, etc. Instead of communicating pain points and working to solve these issues, people sometimes choose to either emote their stress & frustration onto others. Or, worst yet, don't give constructive direct feedback where needed. Quantcast needs to solve this problem and it starts with executive leadership in the way they treat their senior managers which trickles down to their managers then their direct reports. We can hold our people accountable & help our teams adapt to change in a positively constructive way. It doesn't matter if we engineer or provide the best digital programmatic products & services for our customers. If we don't address the unneeded stress, Quantcast will continue to lose talented individuals who will get fed up with the struggle. I've seen it happen. People who are stretched thin don't need an excuse to leave. Recognize these people and reward their behavior. Don't push more onto them or ignore resourcing needs. We are a company heading in a very exciting direction. Konrad & Peter Day are leading an initiative to make Quantcast top of class in their industry and it will happen.

Advice to Management

Keep up the initiative to hold your team members accountable and help everyone understand change. If managers at any level can't hold their team members accountable, don't be afraid to find people who will. We have important initiatives to fullfill. Let's not be held back by people who can't fulfill on commitments. Let's lose the managers or individual contributors who aren't positively impacting our business goals or contributing to a culture of positivity.

Pros

-You get to work with big brand names from time to time. -You work with pretty cool teammates and you can have a great manager. -It is a good stepping stone for your career when you’re younger. -You are forced to be a self starter. -Company throws happy hours once a month. -You get a $100/month credit for your cell phone bill. -Team events and offsides can be at cool venues. -Really great audience insights and stories around data can be told. -Learning about customers and their business goals is super interesting, and you can get creative around what products you sell to meet their needs. -You are forced to source all your new business which can hone your outbound skillset.

Cons

-Chief People Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Operating Officer all left in under one year and were never replaced - what does this tell you about an organizations structure and vision for the future? -No demand generation. They laid off the entire marketing team who to be fair, did no work, and never replaced with a marketing team that generates leads. -Clients can cancel contracts at any time due to factors out of your control such as performance or internal budget cuts. -Lack of brand awareness. -Too many people doing the jobs of 3 or 4 in what should be 1 and being overworked. -Highly unrealistic quotas. For example, if you get a big RFP or a client tends to spend a certain amount per quarter, this will raise your quota whether or not a contract is signed. -Terrible compensation plans. To be totally honest, very few people actually hit quota and you have no greater incentive to bring in more money quarter after quarter. For example, say your quota is $500k one quarter and $800k the next quarter. Say your target pay out is $15k/quarter. You would still need to hit 100% of that number to get the same total payout, despite the fact that you are bringing in significantly more money each quarter. It makes zero sense and accelerators are very flawed and only work if you hit over 100% of what is usually an impossible quota. -The food is not very good most days. -Clients are never happy about a lack of click conversions. -Most of the top performers quit and the few that are left are actively interviewing for new roles despite what management believes. -CFO is totally over his head thinking he can understand what the sales team is going through and is not genuine.

Advice to Management

Sell the company.

Pros

Varying but good opportunities to grow your career, particularly if you start at an entry-level position and have the work ethic and chops to stand apart from the crowd. Incredible people, although many of the best are leaving. The urgency to backfill these positions is evident with the recent AE and AM backfill hires. I had positive experiences with my direct managers and directors and could depend on them for support in my role. But when a company's trajectory shifts from becoming a unicorn to SOS, opportunities to get promoted are limited even if they advocate on your behalf. There are decent perks (including catered food) and a work-life balance that gets out the door by 7 pm. But, this varies significantly by your team and is often sugar-coated by the many AMs that escaped their countless all-nighters working at agencies as digital media planners. The occasional opportunity to be in a room with C-level execs that will inspire you with their life experiences and industry knowledge. There are decent diversity and inclusion programs that make an impact inside and outside of Quantcast, but there is much work to do to soften the "Tech Bro" culture that dominates the sales floor.

Cons

A product that provides little-to-no value paired with sales managers that encourage AEs/AMs to withhold key data that their clients expect. Quantcast's mission is to "help brands grow in the AI era," which translates to Account Executives pushing their bread-and-butter display advertising product on any inexperienced marketer. Quantcast reporting over-inflates its impact. AMs are advised to cherry-pick data, restrict access to reports in the user dashboard, and "curate" site delivery reports that show where clients' ad revenue is being spent. A/B and incrementally test show little to no impact. It's hard to pitch a huge budget increase when you know, deep down, that your product is not delivering what your client wholeheartedly believes it is. But that isn't as hard as the day that your client catches on and starts asking the hard questions that you have been dreading to receive in your inbox since the day they signed on. Don't worry, your AE will scramble to sell through another deal. Rinse, repeat. Pair this with unrealistic sales goals, and it makes sense why Quantcast's attrition rate is so high in the sales and account management organizations that work most closely with its product. To give Quantcast credit, this isn't only an issue inside of their walls but is present in the AdTech industry as a whole. Hold off, keep looking, and seek out companies that offer a product that provides the value it promises. It's easier to sell something you believe in.

Advice to Management

To mid-level management: Keep giving your team ways to grow their career and tackle problems in the org that translate to opportunities outside of Quantcast. But, think past sprinting to your quarterly revenue goal at any costs and stick to a moral compass that allows your team to feel good about the work they are doing.