Scripps's Take On Programmatic; MediaMath's Twitter App

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Pressure On Display

TV station and website owner Scripps Networks reported favorable earnings Thursday and, in the process, commented on the programmatic wave for its websites. Lori Hickok, Scripps’ EVP for finance, said on the earnings conference call with analysts, “What we’re seeing, … which is industry-specific, is pressure on the display ad. So we’re suffering some of that also. But because we have, again, those quality audiences, those quality brands, we’re looking like it’s going to be a lot more positive as we put our strategies together and move towards the back half of the year. But we are watching the programmatic impact on display banners, impact as us well as others.” Read the transcript.

Tailoring Twitter

On Thursday, MediaMath launched its Twitter Tailored Audience App. This lets companies that use MediaMath’s Terminal One programmatic ad-buying service leverage data on Twitter’s platform. MediaMath’s VP for global business, Chris Victory, comments, “With the proliferation of channels and growing number of devices used by any one consumer, advertisers are increasingly seeking an efficient central operating system to manage all of their multichannel advertising strategies and activate their data to grow their marketing ROI.” Read more via Adweek.

Taking Aim At Gamers

Facebook hosts some 375 million gamers monthly, and on Thursday the social media giant announced it would help connect mobile game developers to these users via “targeting clusters.” Facebook’s global director of gaming sales, Rick Kelly, explained, “This is a feature that enables developers to take specific chunks of their customer database – for instance, maybe it’s people who made an in-app purchase in the last 30 days – and the developer can upload that group of users into Facebook’s ad tool and target only those players with a specific message.” Read more via VentureBeat.

In other Facebook news, the social giant unveiled a new analytics tool, “Facebook Audience Insights,” on Thursday. Audience Insights pulls in data from across Facebook to provide additional behavioral, demographic and geographic information about a brand’s customers and the general Facebook audience. Read theblog post.

Programmatic Pirating

As programmatic buying increases, one casualty is rising ad spend on pirated digital video. In February, Digital Citizens Alliance commissioned MediaLink to uncover just how much piracy sites are earning. MediaLink found that between an estimated 596 sites where users commonly access pirated movies and TV shows, an astounding $227 million is raised annually in ad revenue. Andrew Casale, VP of strategy at online ad tech company Casale Media, comments, “This is a huge problem. It’s a giant game of Whac-A-Mole, and the piracy sites know it. When they stop seeing big brands and material spending on their sites, they only need to change their domain names to get back to the spend.” Read more via the WSJ.

Healthy DMP

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Dentsu Taps Out; Prebid Thwarts Transaction Tracking

After selling their demand-side platform Invite Media to Google in 2010, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg started a new, nonadvertising-related venture, Flatiron Health– a data-management platform “which aggregates cancer-patient data from a wide variety of sources to help doctors make treatment decisions,” according to the WSJ. Yesterday, the company announced a $135 million funding round led by, who else, Google Ventures. Read more (subscription).

Mobile Performance

A new report by mobile ad tech firm Celtra looks at mobile ad trends. Marketing Land’s Ginny Marvin summarizes, “The report shows ad performance rates leveled off for the first time since Celtra began reporting on it in 2012. However, areas of growth include video ad consumption, and native ads performed quite strongly.” Read more.

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