Xaxis global chief executive Brian Lesser and Vivaki president, AOD and North American client services, Marco Bertozzi have both denied that the reported trend of advertisers taking programmatic in-house is actually taking place. The pair were interviewed during an ExchangeWire event in New York and were in agreement that reports that major advertisers have taken their programmatic buying in-house were false, and claimed that companies considering such a move was a result of the "distracting" transparency conversation.

Emirates Airlines has opted not to renew its lucrative sponsorship deal with FIFA just months after it was one of several sponsors that voiced concerns over the latest corruption charges against the organisation tarnishing their brands. The company has become the first sponsor to walk away from football's governing body in the wake of fresh corruption allegations against the Qatar World Cup bid. Emirates claims its reason for backing out of the deal was due to unfavourable contractual terms.

Digital economy minister Ed Vaizey will announce three local 'Digital Catapult' projects at the launch of the London centre today. The three projects in Sunderland, Brighton and Bradford will be led by local enterprise partnership (LEP) consortia and along with the London centre are aimed at boosting the UK's digital economy. The government estimates that the initiative will have invested GBP46m in projects to boost the economy by 2018 and return an economic benefit of GBP365m.

Droga5 New York's senior account lead, Nick Simons, is moving to the agency's London office to become managing director. The news comes two weeks after Droga5 Europe's chief executive, Kevin Dundas, left the London agency amid comments from the founder, David Droga, that the agency needed "to operate in a different way." Simons is charged with helping Droga5 Europe attract more clients, as well as managing existing accounts, and will help search for a new chief executive to replace Dundas.

Gartner has revealed that organisations are set to increase their digital marketing spend next year, according to its Digital Marketing Spending report. More than half (51 percent) of the companies surveyed said they were planning to increase their digital marketing budgets by 17 percent with customer experience technology, such as programmatic trading, which serves the right advert at the right time, fuelling increased spending.

Keith Hunt, a managing partner at the corporate finance advisors Results International, predicts that Publicis Groupe's $3.7 billion purchase of Sapient will be the beginning of a string of acquisitions. "It's a very smart move by [Maurice] Levy. The big networks including Publicis have made no secret of their desire to grow their digital revenues. Any Publicis shareholder is going to be much happier to see the business merging with the likes of Sapient rather than the prospect of last summer's ill-fated "merger of equals" with Omnicom.

The chief executive of media regulator Ofcom has said technology companies such as Google and Facebook have "social responsibilities" and it is "absolutely right to ask what society should expect of those organisations." Ed Richards said it was important to ask questions about "what goes over these networks and to what extent we as a society are comfortable with the world that is creating." His comments came after the new director of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, called on U.S. tech companies to do more in the fight against terror.

The Royal British Legion is lifting its marketing to a more strategic role in the organisation to ensure that activity represents its welfare work. The charity is switching from a PR-driven approach to awareness building -- a change it hopes will produce a year-round calendar of marketing activity. Injured service personnel and families who benefit from the legion's support will take centre stage, uniting its commitments to the "future of the living" and the "memory of the fallen" for the first time.

'In five years it might be case that all advertising is either digital or digital enabled' sounds as much like wishful thinking as it does a prediction when you consider it comes from one of Google's top executives, vice president for product management Jerry Dischler. The media giant is certainly busy trying to make sure this is the case. It is making land grabs from traditional media, signing deals with multinationals including Mondelez that will see a larger chunk of the food company's media budget invested in online video.

Ad fraud and viewability obstacles in the programmatic trading space are putting mainstream TV broadcasters off serious conversations about the technique's potential, according to ITV commercial director Simon Daglish. Speaking at MediaTel's Media Playground conference in London, Daglish spoke of his concerns around third-party data, and said it was "hard not to believe" that the problem of ad fraud was similarly as prolific in the UK market as the US, where figures estimate as much as $1bn of ad spend is wasted.