• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, August 31, 2015

The Albarda household quite likes “Jane the Virgin.” I am not sure if we are in the demo for this show, but actress Gina Rodriguez and her TV family, friends and enemies make for wonderful entertainment.

We also really appreciate the inclusion of voiceover actor Anthony Mendez and his quick recaps at the beginning of the show. If you are familiar with his voice and style, please imagine it for a minute voicing the rest of today’s article.

Hello, friends. Where were we? Let’s see:

The industry is going through a period of great change, and all marketers are busy shifting money away from traditional media to their new loves, “digital and content.” They do this  even though malvertising in digital is up 300% and will cost global marketers around $6.3 billion dollars in 2015, according the ANA. And MSN is the latest online media outlet to be hit by it (so never mind the belief that malvertising only happens when you use dodgy and/or cheap digital media).

Both Google and Amazon announced they are killing ads created in Flash starting Sept. 1, as they are seen as the favorite tool used in the malvertising hacks. Never mind that the data we  — marketers —  gather from consumers, or our very own personal data for that matter, is being hacked at the same or even more alarming levels. As a result, some of you might be speaking to your divorce lawyers this coming week.

We also learned that GroupM downgraded its ad outlook for the year by almost a full percentage point. But for mobile advertising, North America is the fastest-growing region, increasing 76.8% year-over-year in 2014, and eMarketer estimates that mobile advertising will expand to $28.72 billion in 2015. How we measure the success, impact and ROI for mobile advertising is something we basically do not know. Nor do we know much about mobile malvertising.

Apart from mostly ignoring the painful malvertising problem and data insecurity, CMOs are admitting they don’t know if any of their marketing investments, with their large and growing digital share, actually matter at all: According to a study from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, which surveyed 255 U.S. marketing executives this summer, only 36% of marketers said they are able to measure the short-term impact of marketing analytics on their business.

But fear not. We are inventing ever more ways to interrupt consumers’ daily lives with new advertising opportunities. AT&T has found a way to inject ads when we use its Wi-Fi network. And Hulu starts selling ads on its network via programmatic — even though our favorite hero/villain, Sir Martin, complains that online video ad growth is being hampered by poor measurement.

As a result of all the bad industry news, and the general malaise in the world of Wall Street, media and agency empires’ value have shrunk alarmingly in just one week’s time. Even the digital frenemies of the media and marketing world — Google and Facebook — were not immune, losing $79 and $14 per share respectively from their most recent highs.

So it was quite the week. Let’s see what the new week brings us.

(OK, switch back to normal voice. All of the above was reported last week across the various MediaPost publications. Want to see the stories – or check that I’m not making this stuff up? Here's the link: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/mediapost-weekend/).