• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, February 16, 2010

MTV Networks has turned to Quantcast to help advertisers refine their targeting of specific audiences on key properties like MTV.com and ComedyCentral.com as well as across its network of more than 200 sites.

The partnership will allow marketers to segment audiences into various demographic categories like moms and "higher-income men" through Quantcast's Web-tracking technology rather than simply targeting a particular MTV site. The Viacom unit started working with Quantcast in 2008 as part of an initiative that let Web publishers receive traffic and usage reports via tags placed on online content.

Now MTV is ready to put the user data collected by Quantcast to work in helping brands target display and video ads across the 200 owned-and-operated sites as well as its Tribes network of 240 affiliated blogs.

"This new capability now provides our advertisers with efficient targeting, adjacency to quality content, and extensive reach. There are very few media companies capable of solving for all three of these primary needs of advertisers," said Kevin Arrix, who heads digital ad sales for MTVN, in a statement.

MTV has signed onto Quantcast's Media Program launched last year, allowing marketers to buy specific audiences on third-party sites based on audience data derived from their own sites. The idea is that brands can find the same type of users that responded to its promotional campaigns or online properties on other sites across the Web. So a marketer could try to match its preferred audience with a similar one across MTV's online properties.

Quantcast and other analytics firms have benefited from the growing shift from content-based media planning and buying to buying particular audiences regardless of online location. The firm boasts having detailed audience profiles across all 220 million U.S. Internet users and getting uptake from nine of the top 10 media agencies.

But tracking techniques that underpin deeper targeting of Web users have also increasingly raised privacy concerns among advocacy groups as well as in Congress and federal regulatory agencies including the Federal Trade Commission.