While RTBlog has been chatting with industry experts for the last month about their predictions for 2016, now Adweek weighs in with its predictions. They are: Premium Retargeting vis-a-vis the Pangea Alliance (a group of premium publishers); Un-Trend, so called Premium "Me-targeting" (enables marketers to show themselves a bunch of display ads based on their own interests; Programmatic Native (that one's going to continue to come up); Un-Trend "Programmatic Invisible" (ads so seamlessly integrated into a site that they "cease to exist at all"); TV Targeting; Un-Trend "Old-School Targeting"'; Automated Guaranteed; Un-Trend "Buzzword Guaranteed" (optimizing for buzzwords); Mobile Programmatic; Un-Trend "Miniature …

eMarketer Analyst Lauren Fisher spoke with Omar Tawakol, group vice president and general manager of Oracle Data Cloud. Tawakol oversees all of Oracle's data management practices and strategies, including the development of its identity graph. In an interview, Tawakol discussed the perils of taking deterministic data at face value, and the increased importance of using first-party data for identifying audiences across devices. As the group vice president and general manager of Oracle Data Cloud, Omar …

The Wall Street Journal notes that the ad-blocking conversation has finally hit pop culture in the form of an episode of "South Park" where it was satirized in recent episodes. During the Comedy Central show, a character named Jimmy "has the rare ability to distinguish between news and advertising. Later, a man tells Jimmy that ads adapted after humans created ad blockers. 'What if I were to tell you that ads have become smarter than us, and now they’re manipulating everything we do?' the character says. Ads became sentient and adapted to 'disguise themselves as news in order to survive' …

At Beet.TV's executive retreat, Videology's North America managing director Tim Castree likens the programmatic video arena to geology. He says you've got: “Sand — How we can use our Nielsen and Rentrak data to score television inventory and then to help our customers to access that inventory through the aggregators and SSPs? Pretty simple stuff, but important stuff and that’s really where this market has kind of started from the bottom up.” And then you have “Rocks — These are premium media owners and agencies who don’t just want to release their inventory to the aggregators and SSPs, they want to …

AdExchanger's Ryan Joe asks the question that might be on everyone's mind: Why are so many ad buying platforms struggling to implement SaaS? Joe notes that there remain many supporters: "One is Bryan Simkins, former SVP of the technology and activation group at Starcom USA, where he helped implement the Turn-Starcom-Kraft deal, and current founding member at consultancy Transparent Media Partners. We’re evolving from a place where we have buyers and sellers to a place where there are a lot of systems and platforms and technologies being used for media,” said Simkins. “Advertisers need to think about separating out costs …

Here's AdExchanger's take on cuts at Collective which reports that the company has split into two independent operating units, one focused on tech and the other on media services. Collective let go 50 employees across the U.S. this week as part of a 20% overall spending cut on the media side. "The changes come in the wake of a steady decline in revenue from big agencies, primarily holding company clients, which have increasingly turned to their own trading desk operations to handle programmatic buying," AdExchanger reports. Recently there have been cuts at PubMatic and Turn, among others.

The Drum's clever video series covers the formation of in-house agency trading desks and marketers' use of programmatic despite their trepidation. The 5th in a series of videos that are rather entertaining.

Venture Beat reported Thursday that a study by mobile ad tech firm AppLift and security company Forensiq says "a surprising proportion of programmatic mobile ad impressions — 34 percent to be exact — is at risk of being fraudulent."  Programmatic mobile ads are served from an exchange to a network of publisher sites based on various kinds of targeting data, usually in real time. The study found that 22% of the total number of impressions studied were "suspect" for being fraudulent, while 12% of the total were at “high risk” of being fraudulent.

An AdExchanger roundup notes a net 9% of the U.S. digital consumer base 'will opt out of advertising in the next three months,' claims Digital Content Next (DCN) in an ad-block report released Dec. 10.. The Apple App Store’s most popular ad blocker, Crystal, went from the No. 1 paid download in October to outside the top 400 now, according to App Annie data. Is this cause for alarm? 

A Forrester report projects that programmatic adoption will ‘skyrocket’ within Europe, with the share of online display ads that are traded programmatically jumping from 37.5% in 2015 to 61% in 2020. And by the end of 2020, over half of video advertising revenue will be sold and executed programmatically, Marketing Week reports. However, despite the rise of programmatic and, in particular, video advertising, Forrester has advised marketers to not look at either as “mass mediums” just yet. In addition, the report notes that "European online display advertising revenue will grow at 12.1% annually between 2015 and 2020, and will reach …