AdExchanger's Kelly Liyakasa reports that Millennial Media, the mobile ad platform AOL acquired in September for $240 million, rolled out its first ad product under new ownership – TV Commercial Retargeting. The new ad product is backed by a partnership with Rentrak, which aggregates set-top box data across 25 million households, tapping into data sets from various cable and satellite providers. Through the new partnership, Millennial Media will be able to link Rentrak’s TV commercial viewership data with its own mobile user data anonymously through Millennial’s data management platform to surface a mobile video ad. Advertisers can add a rich …

Digiday on how The Guardian is trying to create more custom ad experiences to combat ad-blocking. While details are still being hammered out, the goal is to provide an alternative to the approaches taken so far by various publishers, which give people two options: pay up or put up with the ads in their current form. The Guardian is trying a third way that “puts the user in control,” according to the publisher’s global revenue director Tim Gentry. Guardian Labs may play a big role in this area.

Street Fight's Noah Elkin notes that the 2016 elections will be dominated by local targeting and the availability of data--all kinds. He says that "in fact, if anything, with their emphasis on audience and local targeting and their growing adoption of programmatic buying, political campaigns have begun to increasingly resemble marketing campaigns." If this is so, programmatic media growth will be quite robust, helped along by an election year.

RTD reported on Pixalate's discovery of the dangerous botnet Xindi which could cost advertisers nearly $3 billion by the end of 2016, according to a Pixalate report. Ad Age reports that mitigating Xindi's impact over the long term will require the Interactive Advertising Bureau to update that protocol to consider the pace of ad requests, according to Pixalate. "This will ensure that impressions generated after a certain time period cannot be accepted as valid and hence will be non-billable," the Pixalate said in the Ad Age piece. However, the IAB disagreed. "The problem is not with the OpenRTB protocol," said …

A great read in ClickZ that breaks down the benefits of programmatic ad buying and what it actually is. Here's how this highly targeted, efficient, automated process can benefit B2B and B2C marketing strategies and increase ROI. Programmatic advertising - which is the purchase of media inventory based on audience-focused factors - has recently established itself as one of the most popular topics in the world of digital marketing. Within the B2B community, programmatic ad buying has taken center stage for companies looking to get ahead of the trends, to innovate and optimize how they reach out to and connect …

The UK's Channel 4 announced the launch its new ad targeting technology, Premium Video Ad Xchange (PVX), which will allow advertisers to buy demographic audience segments on its All 4 service across devices and platforms using programmatic technologies.Advertisers using PVX will now be able to buy demographic segments at a household level for All 4 audiences across shared devices such as YouView, Xbox and Samsung connected TVs.

AdExchanger's Ryan Joe presents a useful roundup of snapshots that help marketers navigate the confusing world of ad tech consultancies "offering a guiding light through a thicket of confusion". Love the use of "thicket of confusion". What an understatement. Joe includes details on the following consultancies: Deloitte Digital, Infinitive, Jounce Media, MediaLink, Prohaska Consulting, Promatica Consulting and Unbound.

Gotta hand it to those Brits at The Drum. They've got a four-episode series featuring a guy riding around in a car discussing everything you need to know about programmatic along with some cool graphics. Great knock-off concept of Crackle's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Try it out...

Ad Age weighs in on mobile programmatic as the next big thing and three things marketers need to know about it. First, according to eMarketer, mobile programmatic display ad spending will account for more than 60% of total U.S. programmatic display ad spending in 2015. Marketers need to keep in mind three things about mobile programmatic before entering this largely "uncharted territory": 1. Mobile data goes from valuable to useless in minutes. 2. Efficiency is not the enemy of creativity. 3. Weave in "dark social." "Dark social" refers to the fact that most social sharing occurs in private communication (emails, …

AdExchanger's savvy spin on Google's move to enable publishers to expose native ad inventory in their mobile apps to buyers on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The move is projected to lure new brand budgets that typically buy IAB standard placements on exchanges, but whose "native programmatic" buys have been largely relegated to Facebook, Twitter and the small crop of ad tech vendors that have sprouted up in this space.