The American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) are at loggerheads over guidelines and language regarding transparency in the advertising business, according to the Wall Street Journal. Both trade groups formed a joint task force last year to formulate best practices in areas such as media buying and planning. On Thursday the 4As released its own guidelines and said it was unable to reach agreement with the ANA. The paper reported that the 4As said, in a release, that the ANA “sought to go beyond developing guideline language into prescribing contract language; the …

Business Insider reports that Facebook is admitting its concern over ad blockers. And it should be concerned: The social media giant makes about 96% of its revenue from advertising, so if more people start using ad blockers on all of their devices, there could be a major impact on Facebook's financials. BI reports that Facebook flagged ad blocking technologies as a major risk factor in its annual 10-K filing, "noting that they have impacted its ad revenue 'from time to time.' Even so, the warning about ad blockers comes as Facebook delivered "blockbuster fourth-quarter financial results and as its ad business appears to …

Mark Davenport, senior director of analytics at The Trade Desk, weighs in on AdExchanger on much hyped buzzwords and phrases terms like "fraud," "the year of mobile," "going in-house," "fraud" and other heavily used catchphrases. He dissects them in this provocative analysis complete with charts and graphs.

AdExchanger reports on an interesting trend: that more tech and media agencies are developing advertising creative. It reports tat startups like Persado and Celtra have launched new creative automation dashboards. "Mindshare and Opera Mediaworks, for instance, both use Celtra as an ad development tool and a creative-tech hybrid offering for brands. Last summer Opera Mediaworks unveiled a programmatic creative shop, dubbed Opera House, focused on honing creative for its campaigns. Opera House doesn’t represent a revenue push into the creative world, said Mike Owens, the mobile marketing company’s EVP of North American sales, but is simply an acknowledgement that formatting, …

Waze, a startup acquired by Alphabet's Google in 2013, debuted new software that will retrieve more data from active drivers. Waze, the Wall Street Journal reports, changed how millions of people drive by convincing them to share their locations in return for real-time, crowdsourced traffic information. The Waze Transport SDK enables other companies to integrate Waze’s mapping, traffic and driver-guidance data more deeply into their own mobile apps. The paper reports that it launched with six partners, including ride-sharing company Lyft Inc., emergency-dispatch technology provider The Genesis Group and JustPark Parking Ltd. of the U.K., whose app matches drivers with …

Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Chief Randy Rothenberg is on a tear. He lit into ad blockers at the IAB's annual leadership meeting this week. Rothenberg had a few choice words for ad-blocking firms, describing them as an "unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes," according to a report in AdExchanger. He called out tad-blocking companies for their "for-profit models and for setting up shop as gatekeepers," according to the report. He said they create business models “predicated on censorship of content.” These companies operate “an old-fashioned extortion racket, gussied up in the flowery but false language of contemporary consumerism.” And, …

Advertising Age interviewed Google Senior VP-Ads and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy to discuss the rise of ad blocking, why Google pays AdBlock Plus maker Eyeo to unblock its ads and to what extent the Google-led Accelerated Mobile Pages project is addressing the biggest issues plaguing publishers. Ramaswamy says for the longest time, ad blocking was a small scale phenomenon, but that lately, it's become a mainstream phenomenon. "And of course with Apple making moves to have ad blocking also go to mobile and also our own observations about how the mobile ad experience has gotten worse for several sites, we think this …

Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randy Rothenbeg took aim at Adblock Plus, a software company that lets consumers block ads and digital promotions. The company was disinvited from the IAB's annual leadership meeting which kicked off on Jan. 24. Adweek reports that Rothenberg blasted Adblock Plus' depiction of the situation and called the group "an unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes." He added, "We had never invited them in the first place," he said in his keynote. "They registered for this event online. When we found out, we canceled the registration and reversed their credit card billing."

In the run-up to the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1, Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders has launched a 9-day Snapchat campaign to lure the youth vote, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Sanders campaign launched the real-time marketing device on Jan. 24 with the first of nine Snapchat geofilter as. The ads are visual images people can add to their Snapchat videos only when they are present in specific locations, according to the Journal. On Jan. 25, the geofilter ads read “Feel The Bern: One Week Until Caucus Night!”, while Wednesday’s ad reads “Feel The Bern in 5 Days!” Nice …

Ad tech provider OpenX is launching "real-time guaranteed" technology (RTG), a mix of open and private marketplaces that “combines the efficiency and precise targeting of real-time bidding with the guaranteed business terms that are typical for direct-sold media”, says OpenX GM Paul Sternhell in an interview with Beet.TV.  Unlike private auctions, RTG allows publishers to sell ads with guaranteed volume commitments, but using real-time bidding (RTB) technology for greater efficiency.