Ad Ops Insider offers an amazingly detailed roundup of ad tech providers' header bidding processes and procedures. The Insider looks at vendor sites like AppNexus, Criteo, PubMatic, Rubicon and more to find examples of each kind of header bidding integration available on the market today. Each example offers a screenshot and the response code from the header bidder, as well as the matching parameter in the call to the ad server. A must-scan.

Former Red Bull marketing chief Huib van Bockel has added his two cents to the ad-blocking convo. He wants the ad industry to stop the war: "Stop trying to penetrate the wall people are clearly putting up. That starts with changing our behavior. The key in this social era is not to be ON social media, the key is to BE social. We should change the very first question we ask ourselves in the boardroom. ...Instead of asking: how can we make sure ‘consumers’ will like us, how can we make them buy us? How can we target them? …

In an interview with The Intercept, Edward Snowden, known for WikiLeaks, offered some advice on what average citizens can do to protect their privacy. His first tip is to turn on an ad blocker when you're browsing the web. He says: "We've seen internet providers like Comcast, AT&T, or whoever it is, insert their own ads into your plaintext http connections. ...As long as service providers are serving ads with active content that require the use of Javascript to display, that have some kind of active content like Flash embedded in it, anything that can be a vector for attack …

Google has finally allowed publishers to expose native ad inventory in their mobile apps to buyers on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The move is widely expected to bring in more ad dollars to native advertising.

eMarketer suggests that around 83% of all ad buying activity by 2017 will be programmatic. This article looks at the reasons why programmatic ad buying could be one of the most important strategies advertisers employ in 2016. Using programmatic, media buying become more streamlined, cost-efficient and less complicated.

Wladimir Palant is partly to blame about the furor over ad blocking. Palant is the creator of Adblock Plus, which has 60 million active users, making it the most popular of the ad blockers. That gives Palant, a shy, privacy-minded software developer from Moldova, and his company, Eyeo, an outsize role in determining the future of Internet advertising. He wants to force a truce by letting only certain ads through the blocker. In other words, his goal is to save the Web by making ads less annoying.

Penry Price, vice president of marketing solutions at LinkedIn, weighs in on ad blocking in a commentary that urges the industry to take the issue seriously and address it as an imbalance.  Price calls ad blocking "as seismic a shift as the rise of streaming video, and it truly represents a crisis. If we don't treat it seriously as an industry, you'll find quotes from ad executives dismissing it as a fad in the pantheon of misguided predictions about technology" -- referring to this quote from former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes in 2010 on Netflix's prospects: "It's a little …

WPP Group's media-buying arm, which controls $106 billion in global ad spending, last week promoted Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser to a big new job running its North America business. His elevation came just two days after GroupM said it would acquire Essence, a digital media agency known for its programmatic chops. The elevation of a trading desk CEO to a major cross-agency role is a first among agency holding companies. At rival agency groups, most such roles are still filled by executives whose careers dev eloped in the last decades of the 20th Century, when print, radio and …

Ad blocking is on the rise in the UK, with 18% web users saying they use the software, up from 15% just five months ago. The increase, captured in research by the Internet Advertising Bureau, is equivalent to more than 1.3 million people adopting the technology since June. Though the rise is modest, it suggests dissatisfaction with ads is growing, especially among the young, with 35% of 18- to 24-year-olds saying they blocked ads, compared to just 15% of over 55s.

With the launch of a new Connect API, HipChat is inviting developers to build new versions of their apps inside of the messaging service. As VentureBeat notes: “The API will allow data to be displayed in richer format than plain text, triggered by a few words in a command line, unlike the updated API from Slack, a team communication app and HipChat rival.”