If the Advertising Research Foundation's Town Hall on the ad industry's code of conduct concerning data collection and consumer privacy is any indication, don't expect a consensus anytime soon. The panel discussion could be summarized as a debate between two opposing philosophical views: One represented by Rolfe Swinton, director of data assets at Germany's GfK, who took the progressive view on consumer's right to data self-sovereignty, popular among Europeans; and another held by digital ad tech native Rick Bruner, who had a more laissez-faire view that no real harm is done to consumers by using their personal data to target …

Maybe it's because I'm utterly confused by the second season opener of "Westworld" Sunday night, but I'm thinking a lot about humans this morning, especially the notion that the more we become a machine-oriented as species, the more we need human beings to govern those machines to make sure they're serving the right masters and optimizing the correct outputs. But the real reason I'm thinking this way is a couple of news announcements about some human talent plays.

Native advertising and "content discovery" platform Taboola has an ambitious plan to help people discover even more content, specifically "news." The company, which is best known for enabling brands to scale native advertising across the open Web, has struck a deal to operate a news feed app on people's phones. "It's like Apple News," boasts Adam Singolda, who founded Taboola 11 years ago and serves as its CEO. Unlike Apple News, Taboola's news reader is native to Android phones, and its first deal enables it to distribute on devices manufactured by ZTE, the fourth largest phone brand in the U.S. …

eMarketer's revised U.S. programmatic display advertising estimates show that auction-based real-time bidding now comprises less than a quarter of the total programmatic display advertising marketplace. Presumably, much of that goes to the "long-tail": smaller marketers and platforms optimizing, leveraging and "mopping up" display ad inventory not optimized by the more direct and controllable programmatic markets.

If I had received Wall Street analyst Brian Wieser's most recent note to investors a day earlier, I would have thought it was an April Fool's prank, but the fact that it is datelined April 2nd, affirms that it starts off with Wieser's perennial sense of humor: A mock exchange between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining his infamous "dumb as f***s" quip to a Senators at a Congressional hearing on consumer data privacy slated for later this month.