Programmatic TV Without Real-Time Targeting; Native Big On Mobile

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Programmatic TV, Pouring Concrete

Speaking to Beet.TV, Adap.tv programmatic SVP Dan Ackerman said real-time targeting is not essential to making programmatic TV work. “If you can improve the accuracy of targeting and the accountability a year in advance, that’s a huge move. … Even a week. … You don’t need to have these biddable environments and real-time [ad] insertion,” Ackerman said. “TV just doesn’t operate that way and it doesn’t need to. If you found 10% more accuracy and 10% efficiency on a $70 billion business, the value for everybody in the ecosystem is huge.” Separately, in a thought piece penned for Broadcasting & Cable, Videology CEO Scott Ferber says three main hurdles to programmatic TV remain: the availability of data, systems unification and cross-screen measurement. Read more.

Native Is Mobile

Research from native ad vendor Adyoulike suggests the majority of brands’ native ads are viewed via mobile devices. According to the data, B&Q, Capital One, Domino’s Pizza and UBS are among the brands seeing 55% of user engagement with native content on mobile. “Consumers are moving away from the traditional, both in terms of ad formats and devices,” Francis Turner, managing director at Adyoulike UK, told The Drum. “The results show that online advertisers looking to engage with tech-savvy, urban, socially mobile 18-34-year-olds would be well advised to embrace native advertising formats,” he added.

Geo-Programmatic

Metamarkets paired up with analytics firm Factual to support geotargeted mobile ads. Metamarkets is a programmatic data provider that offers cloud infrastructure to DSPs, and to SSPs like MoPub and Flurry. Factual’s tools have also been licensed by Adelphic and WPP Group. “With the rise of beacon data, I think a lot of that [mobile data] will ultimately inform other areas of the advertising landscape, whether it be display or even linear TV,” commented Metamarkets CEO Mike Driscoll. GeoMarketing has more.

Resolving Identities

Experian-owned AdTruth will release an offering called AdTruth Resolve this week, to go along with its AdTruth ID product. AdTruth ID provides its clients with the ability to statistically identify and link mobile devices in a cookieless environment. AdTruth Resolve is what Americas GM Martin Gilliard describes as a digital resolution technology. “We’ll take a look at the identifiers and signals across all digital devices and tie it into digital identities, household identities, and even use deterministic information,” he said. Resolve is meant to integrate into an existing tech stack. So if you pop it into a data-management platform, it’s designed to align AdTruth IDs as well as all the different identities pumping through the platform to provide that vaunted single-customer view.

Twitter’s Troll Trouble

In a telling internal memo obtained by The Verge late last week, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo shoulders the blame for Twitter’s troll problem, which has cost the company users. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo wrote. “We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front.” It’s not surprising Costolo is taking user loss seriously, as that headache took center stage during Twitter’s earnings. Between 2014’s Q3 and Q4, Twitter’s US MAUs remained static at 63 million, though Costolo blamed an iOS 8 bug for that. Read AdExchanger’s coverage.

Yelp Mixed

What does Yelp have in common with Twitter? Stalled user growth, for one thing. After reporting its quarterly and year-end earnings late last week, shares of the company plummeted 20% (ditto Pandora). Investors grew wary despite the fact that Yelp upped its annual revenue by 62% to $377.5 million. To attract new users and ease investor concerns, COO Geoff Donaker revealed plans to increase marketing spend to $30 million in 2015 from $10 million in 2014. That figure is “as much as we think we could reasonably spend this year,” Donaker told investors during the call. “But obviously, we’re not yet ready for huge amounts of marketing well beyond that,” he added. Read the release.

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