Aegis Media has promoted Steve Hobbs managing director of its Amnet agency trading desk in the U.K. He had been director of media operations.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel acknowledges that Yahoo has approached PubMatic as a potential acquisition target.

RTB is normally an acronym for real-time bidding popular among performance marketers, but it can also represent "real-time branding," according to Simpli.fi CEO and Co-Founder Frost Prioleau, citing recent comments from brand marketers embracing programmatic media-buying.

The only thing better for a marketer than anticipating the future behavior of a consumer is for a marketer to know how a consumer is acting right now. Thanks to today's technology, marketers do know how consumers are acting in real-time. ClickZ asks, "What does that do to predictive models?" Marketers are able to use automated technology to make decisions faster; in real-time, even. It seems to help everyone and everything - brands, marketers, consumers, publishers - except for old methods. So does that mean predictive models are dead? Or are they merely evolving?

The effect programmatic buying will have on the way agencies buy media will be akin to the impact digital publishing had on the newspaper industry, GroupM Australia Chief Digital Officer Danny Bass tells The Australian. "My view is the trials journalists and newsrooms have been through in the past few years are hitting media sales teams," he says. "In the short term it could be as brutal. The cost to run sales organisations in Australia is particularly high."

Microsoft's Atlas ad-serving product could be acquired by Facebook as soon as next week, reports AdAge. If the deal ends up going through, it sets Facebook up to rival Google in digital advertising. Not only does Facebook want to prove the worth of the data it has, says AdAge, but it also wants to prove the effectiveness of its ads.

Real-time bidding is morphing into real-time buying, says Forrester analyst Joanna O'Connell, who makes the case that the movement is bigger than just bid-based trading, especially as private marketplaces begin to emerge.

Econsultancy's Ashley Friedlein opines that the real issues concerning "programmatic marketing" are not man vs. machine, but are, "about business models and the nature of decision-making. Look at Amazon's retail success. It's a data-driven behemoth, whose algorithms and programmatic approach to business continue to power its prosperity. Compare this to well-loved brands that have failed despite being redolent with stories and emotional connections, like HMV and Woolworth's. Does this teach us we should submit entirely to the rise of the machines?"

Programmatic media buying will grow to 70% of all media-buying -- not just digital -- within the next five years, Ikon Communications National Digital Director Ellie Rogers said during a Future of Digital Media forum in Sydney, Australia. She estimated that within digital media transactions, only 18% occurred outside of programmatic buying, at least in her market.

Videology's Dave Randall offers a good how-to for using RTB for online video. Instead of its "race-to-bottom" perception among some video sellers, Randall suggests, "the online video market is in the perfect position to change that perception. The key reason is supply - or shall we say limited supply."