TechCrunch has reported that Antonio Garcia-Martinez, who left Facebook in April after serving as exchange director, has joined Nanigans, one of Facebook's ad partners.

TechCrunch reported today that mobile real-time bidding platform Gradient X is no longer in beta.

"...[B]y merging programmatic buying and social signals, Facebook has created a categorically new advertising world." That's what VentureBeat wrote about Facebook and the Facebook Exchange (FBX) today. They wrote that Facebook's new News Feed ads are changing the way social is viewed. "Facebook hit on a winning combination from a direct response perspective by fusing two things," AdRoll President Adam Berke told VentureBeat. "They combined the power of programmatic advertising with Facebook's own secret sauce - this native environment which is very engaging."

Forbes today posted a profile of AppNexus' Chief Executive Officer, Brian O'Kelley, writing that he can be "a bit irascible." However, he's turned his company into one with over 500 employees in five years, and is "arguably the most brilliant software engineer in New York's brimming ad-tech community," Forbes wrote.

Sociomantic is moving into Southeast Asia by opening up a Singapore office on July 1, TechCrunch reports. Rohit Kumar, a former founding member of Google's EMEA ad exchange, will lead Sociomantic's Singapore operations.

"I think client appetite for [programmatic] is very high," Kurt Unkel, VivaKi's president of products and services, said in an interview with Beet.tv. "Especially the ones that want to lean in - really understand it - ... those are really fascinating patterns to see happen." He reckoned that the technology is finally matching the philosophical goal.

"You cannot - not yet - solely rely on a computer or a system for programmatic buying," writes iMedia Connection. They note that real-time bidding algorithms don't take into account emotions or current weather conditions and that in the end, the human brain is still required.

CMO. It stands for Chief Marketing Officer, right? Well, usually, yes, but Martin Smith, VP of business development at TruEffect, wrote on CMO.com that it needs a second meaning: Chief Measurement Officer. He also argued that everyone needs the "other CMO;" someone in charge of actually doing something with all of that big data and consumer information.

Mobile real-time bidding (RTB) has come on strong over the past 12 months, and Adotas has defined the four basic components of mobile RTB, how it can be put to work, and what role real-time predictive targeting can play. Adotas wrote, "Recently, we have seen predictive modeling in RTB moving well beyond static activities, such as segmenting and simple retargeting campaigns, toward predictive targeting and real-time decisions."

IMedia Connection wrote that premium inventory is essentially any "inventory that the advertiser would be happy to run its advertising on if it could manually review every single publisher and page that the ad was going to appear within." The problem, they wrote, is scale. When applied to ad exchanges, "the curation problem gets dropped back in the laps of the buyers across more publishers and pages than they can manually curate...."