When Clearspring closed its Launchpad last year and acquired AddThis, I wondered at the type of recommendations the company would eventually be able to provide. We’re beginning to find out now, with Clearspring’s revelation of its Audience Platform. The new exchange presents micro-segments for large audiences.With it, publishers can snap up packaged data sets for their targeting purposes.

Taking its analytics offerings a step further, the Audience Platform provides additional insight into demographic groups. Consider it the icing on the cake for an advertiser’s existing data set. If an agency knows its creating a campaign around movies, the Audience Platform can help it drill down into more details, such as the type of movie, its lead actors, etc.

As Clearspring has spent the past year or so gathering information from its massive social sharing network, the company found itself waist-deep in raw numbers. Given the quick adoption of real-time trends by the advertising world, Clearspring saw its next opportunity here.

So have many others. Real-time content sharing and delivery has spilled over to the marketing world, where real-time bidding on related data is becoming the norm. These network exchanges are being offered in as many shapes and sizes as there are brands that need them–Clearspring’s differentiating factor is its analytics combined with scalability, enabling brands to go outside of major ad networks.

These data exchanges have also provided the means for smaller agencies to act bigger, and participate in larger advertising networks. Accessing a similar data set from a larger ad network would still limit you to that network. Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar gives me an example,

“Yahoo for [instance]. They’ve got tons of impressions in their network and have data on people in the network. There’s so much liquidity in these exchange networks, u need real scale and audience to buy into these impressions. We can help agencies buy at the scale and move beyond Yahoo for targeted ads.”

Clearspring isn’t the only one prompting scalability through new access to socially-driven data sets. Brightroll launched its exchange earlier this week, and Infochimps is applying a similar approach to its pre-packaged data sets as well.