According to The Drum, Facebook's integration of FBX to its news feed could "accelerate" the interest in RTB, increasing the amount of premium inventory available on the exchange. Additionally, "some agencies believe that opening up the ability to serve Exchange-delivered ads within the news feed could help boost spend in the RTB space in general," wrote The Drum.

Today's media buyers are being taken out of the loop because the buying and selling of inventory is so data-driven today that the media buyers of old need updates, writes iMedia Connection. "On the publisher side, there have been reports that the glad-handing sales teams of old...are being replaced by quantitative specialists because today's media buys increasingly require a sales force that is technically fluent in ad severing technology...."

Adotas reported yesterday that HookLogic has launched Retail Search Exchange, an RTB exchange for paid search ads on retail sites. Adotas wrote, "Retail Search Exchange takes the retail environment and puts it up for auction. It basically shifts the focus, power, and efficiency of programmatic buying and aims it directly at active shoppers."

TechCrunch reported today that Tibco Software has bought Maporama Solutions, a French geolocation company. The acquisition will bring real-time geolocation data to Tibco's Spotfire data analytics platform.

Econsultancy broke down some of the basics on RTB today, defining the term and spelling out why online advertisers are so drawn to the technology. The article compares traditional display media buying to RTB, saying that traditional online advertising relies on negotiation skills while RTB "removes the middle man."

The "B" in RTB most commonly stands for "bidding" and "buying," but Rhys McLachlan, director of corporate and business development at Videology, believes that there is much more to the "B" than that.

According to AdNews, four of Australia's big online publishers - Fairfax Media, News Ltd., Mi9, and Yahoo!7 - are planning to launch their own real-time exchange. AdNews reports that the exchange should be named within two weeks and will launch by the end of April.

Marketing Profs this week wrote an article that says that real-time bidding is ushering in the eara of "lean" marketing for dispaly advertising. What exactly is "lean" marketing, though? According to Marketing Profs, "lean" marketing is designed around "discovering customer needs rather than predicting them." The article says that it is becoming easier for marketers to build "lean" campaigns as more online display inventory is opened up for real-time bidding.

In an article today, Adotas spelled out four hidden pitfalls of RTB, some of which have been heard before. The first pitfall is the one that is most commonly heard: RTB equates to reduced inventory quality.

According to ClickZ, the answer to the chicken-or-egg scenario between social networks and real-time marketing is now irrelevant. The only thing that matters at this point is that "real-time marketing is becoming a brand imperative."