Predictive analytics vendor EverString has raised $65 million in Series B funding. “The company launched only 15 months ago after being founded back in 2012 and essentially takes some big data infrastructure … but delivers it in a user-accessible way,” reports Computerworld.  

Despite its promise, a number of publishers are eschewing programmatic advertisers, The Wall Street Journal reports. They include Vice Media, Vox Media, BuzzFeed, and Refinery29. Together, they argue that “automated ad technologies are to blame for overrunning the Internet with too many ads and obnoxious tracking mechanisms,” WSJ reports.  

Revenues from programmatic video ads are set to rocket in Europe during the next five years, according to a new report, "Video Advertising in Europe: The Road to Programmatic Ubiquity." Conducted by IHS for the video inventory management firm SpotX, the study followed initial research two years ago. Where the earlier survey covered just the EU-5-France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK-the 2015 edition was extended to other markets, including the Nordics, Switzerland, and Central and Eastern Europe.

As display ads move away from Flash to HTML5, many marketers are willing to spend more on creative programmatic ads, according to Ad Week. HTML5 ads have higher deliverability rates on desktop and mobile devices, so marketers are finding creative programmatic ads that are targeted and personalized to be worth their while. Some notable examples of the trend are that Amazon has shifted to HTML5-only promos, while Google has dropped autoplaying Flash ads in Chrome.

"We're going to crawl, walk, run on this," said Mike Hopkins, CEO of Hulu, talking about the OTT service's programmatic advertising plans. Taking a slower programmatic approach than other services, Hulu is going to automate the ad-buying process first, then work with individual advertisers to marry its data with their creative assets. Hulu will maintain a strict ad frequency cap throughout the process, and won't add real-time bidding.

Sharethrough, the native supply side platform, and AppNexus, the world's leading independent advertising technology company, today announced the first complete native advertising RTB integration. This integration will allow brand marketers to access billions of ad impressions at scale across hundreds of premium sites and apps via the Sharethrough Exchange (STX).

Microsoft will soon include its real-time language translation tool directly into Skype for Windows PCs. In other words, “The 100 million users already on the service will soon be able to have video chats with people of different languages without downloading a specialized app,” GeekWire reports.  

When Interpublic Group announced an ambitious plan to automate at least half of its ad buying by 2016, many in media rolled their eyes. It was 2013, and automated buying had not yet been widely embraced. Many people didn't even understand the term programmatic. But fast-forward to the present day, and IPG's goal no longer appears out of reach. Automated buying has caught on more quickly than anyone imagined, and it will define the coming years of media buying, saving clients and agencies money.

Technologies that facilitate content marketing will remain the most important marketing technology for B2B marketers in the U.S., according to a September 2015 Spear Marketing Group survey. The two technologies that B2B marketers rated as most important are also among the biggest winners in terms of ROI. While marketing automation leads the way with 58% of respondents expecting it to deliver ROI, content marketing (51%) and SEO (36%) are also depended upon to get results.

A growing trend online is called programmatic advertising. It's a way of automating much of the process of placing ads and also includes the capability of tightly targeting specific individuals that data suggest might be interested in a company's messages. Doing something like that in print requires direct mail, which is vastly more expensive. Advertisers opt for faster, cheaper and better, and investors follow the money