How important is social TV: people posting and reading comments about TV programs on social media platforms? A recent study, undertaken by the Council for Research Excellence in September and October of 2013, surveyed the online population of people 15 to 54 and found that on a typical day, about 19% of them are reached by social media regarding prime-time TV.

It's a common misconception among brand marketers that conversions that take place offline are inherently "untrackable." It's true that marketers have historically been challenged in their attempts to correlate online activity with offline purchases. However, "digital onboarding" techniques enable marketers to connect offline transaction data with different marketing tactics, providing a more accurate and holistic picture of the customer journey and a far better understanding of the influence each marketing touchpoint has on an offline conversion.

The IAB hosts a Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) educational forum once a month in order to foster knowledge-sharing about measurement change and support the implementation of viewability. These sessions have been well attended and have helped many come up to speed on the massive transition that arrived once the Media Ratings Council (MRC) gave the green light to transact on viewable. Still, despite a plethora of educational sessions, an in-depth 3MS website including a comprehensive FAQ section, copious amounts of press coverage and more, a steady drumbeat of concerns and questions in the marketplace seems to persist.

Ray Pettit, Ph.D., is the chief analytics officer for ITVX at Rentrak, which means he is deeply immersed in the measurement of branded and in-program content. In my interview with him, Pettit talks about ITVX, biometrics in measurement, cross-platform applications to ITVX, native advertising measurements -- and, because he began his career as a musician, the importance of a liberal arts education in professional growth.

Ultimately, Google's goal with the Panda update is to ensure that consumers are pointed to the highest quality Web pages possible. But for all its good intentions, there have been some clear winners and losers, whose websites either gained or lost visibility in Google's organic search results.

Now that advertising is driven by "big data," marketers are well aware that certain targeting segments can make a positive impact on their campaigns. In ad tech, anyone with an algorithm and a data scientist on their staff can make a few bucks by pulling together some appealing segments and selling them to marketers. However, not all data segments are created equal. If online marketers and data companies keep trying to plug in the same segments, campaign after campaign, they will see diminishing returns. Targeting the same mom or auto intender segments doesn't do much good. Marketers need some outside-the-box …

We've reached another milestone in revolutionizing the measurement of digital ads. On June 30, the Media Rating Council's (MRC) gating period for transacting on accredited measures of video viewability ended, ushering in an era of new transactional currency. The new era may be underway, but it is still early enough that some are still in need of the basics.

Marketers today are swimming in data: customer data, loyalty data, first-party and third-party data, social media data, etc. All this data is great for learning more about customers and their preferences, but how do you use it to improve campaign effectiveness? The following are seven key considerations -- a checklist of best practices, if you will -- to help marketers use their data to improve the performance of their media buys.

From mobile phones and tablets to laptops and desktops, today's consumers are using an ever-increasing number of devices to access the Web, search for information, make purchases, and more. In fact, for the first time in U.S. history, consumers now use smartphone and tablet apps more than PCs to access the Internet.

June 30 is almost here. That date is the next milestone in the transition to viewable currency. It is the day when the Media Rating Council (MRC)'s gating period for video viewability measurement ends - and trading against video viewability, as measured by accredited vendors, can begin. June 30 is also the close of the first round of refinements to display viewability measurements based on the MRC Reconciliation Study.