Vistar Media, an ad serving tech provider, has raised $1.5 million in its first round of funding. With the new funding, TechCrunch reports that Vistar "hopes to bring real-time bidding to the digital out-of-home market." In a statement, Kiran Hebbar, general partner at Valhalla said, "Vistar Media's team of programmatic display media experts is positioned to take advantage of the trend in what many regard as the most interesting segment for programmatic, digital out of home. The next five years will bring us closer to the vision portrayed in science fiction movies like Minority Report, with advertisers delivering messages with …

"Hey, real-time marketing was fun while it lasted, wasn't it," proclaims Huffington Post blogger Shawn Amos, adding, "One day you're The Next Big Thing; the next day you're marched off to the sales & marketing history museum with Burma-Shave signs and the Fuller Brush man." It seems Amos is reacting not so much to the Super Bowl as some poorly executed real-time efforts during the Academy Awards.

In a Q&A with Adage.com, Varick Media Management Vice President-Trading and Platform Operations Keith Gooberman says its time for a role reversal in which data scientists begin to understand the needs of marketing: "I wish data scientists would understand more about marketing. Data scientists know how to pull statistically significant samples of aggregated information from large data sets. True data scientists are not well-versed in advertising terms or what each piece of data actually represents. They often need to be assisted in extracting valuable insights from a data set. This is not because they don't know how to build a …

SiteScout Director of Marketing Ratko Vidakovic explains the relationship between buying "direct" from publishers and ad networks vs. buying similar, if not the same inventory via real-time bidding. Hint: It's all about the yields -- for publishers and advertisers.

Videology President Tom McMahon spelled out the differences between programmatic and RTB in an interview with Joanna O'Connell, principal analyst, Forrester Research on Beet.TV. McMahon calssified programmatic as the umbrella term for all automated buying and selling, and classified RTB as the buying of impressions in an auction format.

Google AdWords users can now use WeatherFIT, a platform that can control ad placement based on the weather, writes Econsultancy. WeatherFIT uses real-time local weather conditions to determine which ads should be placed. The criteria is set beforehand (i.e. - only show ad X if it's cold and rainy), and the rest is left up to mother nature.

In an EContent article answering whether or not data is the new media, the topic of private exchanges arose, highlighting that "publishers are playing catch-up with marketers in the data arms race on multiple fronts." Bryan Burdick, COO and co-founder of Bizo, told EContent that the "data arms race" doesn't have to lead to a race to the bottom, but did note that advertisers are typically better at understanding the value of an impression than publishers.

"Programmatic is for remnant inventory." That's the number one myth about programmatic, according to an iMedia Connection article. The article spells out the four biggest myths about programmatic, including the myth that "programmatic" means "RTB."

It should come as surprise that the Facebook Exchange (FBX) has its eyes on Google. Despite starting as two completely different companies, Facebook and Google have begun acting like brothers trying to outdo each other in everything. In a recent article, Newsday writes of FBX, "Facebook's biggest challenge lies a 15-minute drive away at Mountain View-based Google. The search engine provider dominates the online ad-exchange market with a share of at least 50 percent...." Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group LLC told Newsday that Google "will be aggressive in defending its turf."