If you work in real-time advertising, you shouldn't just care about attribution models, you should be downright obsessed with them. Why? Because attribution means figuring out which aspects of your campaign are working, and how you can do better. And if you don't care about that, well, then real-time advertising might not be your true calling.

The latest threat to programmatic brand advertising (PBA) is obesity. Everyone knows America tops the list of obese countries, but we are also contributing to the epidemic facing a fatter programmatic premium market, which threatens our digital fitness and ability to make decisions in real time. There are many symptoms of our obese PBA marketplace. Let's take a look at each of them.

Today's programmatic brand advertisers are finding it critical to build upon the four waves of development in analytics and measurement. These waves include current viewability and quality efforts, the work in audience buying, big data powering and validating programmatic initiatives, and the movement from dashboards to real-time measurement by industry experts.Let's go over each of these waves in detail.

Like many publishers, agencies are burdened by the sky-high procedural cost of buying and selling digital media. We thought RTB could be a solution, but both sides rely on the predictability and the guarantees afford by reserved media sales. We're now seeing that it's a different type of automated media buying that's going to become increasingly important for media organizations.

The recent shift to real-time buying (RTB) and growth of programmatic marketing has changed the traditional way of buying display media, making it more actionable for smaller businesses than ever before. With traditional forms of display advertising, advertisers had to cough up large sums upfront in order to reach their target audience for a given campaign. The challenge for SMBs was that they didn't have access to the sizable budgets of larger advertisers, and therefore felt limitations in terms of scale and reach. However, because of the influx of programmatic marketing and real-time buying, algorithms are enabling the right ads …

Private marketplaces are widely seen as a hot opportunity for brands and advertisers. Here are a few ways that buyers and sellers can ensure private marketplaces become a formidable medium for their business objectives, and not just a shallow foray into a new technology:

Since the beginning of the digital media era, AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and now Facebook have set the direction, held the most reach, and developed or acquired the majority of advertising technology. These companies are referred to as the "big five" in digital media, similar to the term coined by African big game hunters for the species most difficult to bag: lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, and cape buffalo. Many bankers, investors, and technologists believe there is a new big five looking to capture more ad space now that more technology is coming into ad tech. Programmatic is considered the catalyst …

Programmatic clearly works, and it delivers real value to a lot of advertisers. But there are plenty of nooks and crannies that mainstream programmatic can't reach. And in our experience, those crevices are often filled with enough gold to turn a great many campaigns extremely profitable. Let me explain.

Recently Ethan Zuckerman wrote in The Atlantic that he had "come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web." It's a good (though long) article, one that anyone working in the digital ad space should take time to read. To extend Zuckerman's metaphor: as with the biblical concept of original sin, which simultaneously paved the paths to damnation and possibility, digital advertising has created alienation but also enabled development.

Even though we have been hearing a lot about big data, the amount we are actually gathering today pales in comparison to what is about to happen once device connectivity and sensors come into play from the Internet of Things (IoT).