AdExchanger reports AOL has rolled out a bunch of new sell-side tools into a unified publisher platform called ONE by AOL: Publishers. ONE launched on Monday. AOL also said it will acquire AlephD, a French yield management startup. “AlephD is one more piece we’re adding to this vision of building a unified but open stack,” Tim Mahlman, president of publisher platforms, told AdEchanger. Mahlman joined AOL in 2014 via the acquisition of his video syndication platform, Vidible.

Adweek reports that 2016 will be cross-device programmatic's big year. In 2015,  eMarketer predicted programmatic digital display ad spending in the U.S. to total $15.43 billion, with projected growth to $21.55 billion in 2016 and $26.78 billion in 2017. "It's becoming less and less the case that marketers or brands are just looking to reach their chosen audience on a single device or screen at a time—they're looking to get a lot more holistic," said Joe Laszlo, vp of industry initiatives at Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which is holding its Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, Calif., today.

CNET tries out the Brave browser. The ads show up based on your browsing history vs. using cookies to track your history. Firefox also has private browsing with tracing protection that stops sites from spying on you by blocking ads.

The Local Search Association Insider writes that while ad blocking as been called a huge issue for the ad industry writ large, Greg Sterling notes that ad blocking hasn't popped up as a "local issue" yet. But, he says, anything that impacts digital at a national level, will eventually make its way down to local, as the technologies are similar. Ad blockers generally don’t impact in-app advertising (though they can) or native ads (e.g., Yahoo Gemini, Facebook News Feed). And because to date most SMBs and their marketing service providers haven’t …

Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill took aim at the ad industry on Thursday. In essence, she said some advertisers are going overboard tracking consumers across multiple devices without giving them any say in how they are being tracked. And Web publishers and advertisers alike better start clearly labeling content paid for by marketers as “advertising," according to the Wall Street Journal. Brill delivered her missives at the AdExchanger Industry Preview conference. She told the audience that "cross-device targeting “is harder to detect and harder for consumers to control... and it’s not clear consumers are meaningfully informed about cross-device tracking.”

At AdExchanger's Industry Preview on Thursday, Amazon VP of global ad sales Seth Dallaire said during a panel discussion that the company's priority for data and marketing on the platform this year is "trying to help agencies and advertisers understand the types of reporting and interpret the events on our platform.” Dallaire took pains to explain that "data that can inform marketers, including how users interact with brand pages, product reviews or their online shopping cart, is first and foremost a part of the Amazon user experience."  Facebook and Google, as walled gardens, are facing similar challenges. Many in the …

This is a staggering stat: Google disabled 49% more ads in 2015 vs. 2014, due to doubts about dubious online marketing tactics, according to the Wall Street Journal's Digits. Google's Alphabet unit reported that it had removed more than 780 million ads in 2015 for violating its policies, up from 524 million in 2014, 350 million in 2013 and 220 million in 2012. “The absolute number of bad ads is going up as is the total number of ads we show,” said Tom Siegel, vice president of Google’s Trust & Security group, told Digits. Google is known to block ads …

With programmatic commanding an increasing share of marketing budgets, trading desk knowledge will expand throughout organizations, AdExchanger reports. At the publication's Industry Preview conference on Wednesday, Accuen CEO Megan Pagliuca said she expects the company's trading desk to decentralize when programmatic reaches 70% to 80% of media budgets, which is projected to happen in the next five years. During another discussion at the conference, Mac Delaney, formerly of Merkle and VivaKi, said Publicis' decentralization of VivaKi's trading desk was a mistake. He called it "90% political." In the wake of that decision, VivaKi experienced a talent drain; the decentralization came …

Google is hoping to take a bite out of Twitter's business for real-time marketing campaigns by introducing a new ad format called real-time ads that enable marketers to trigger promos around big events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars immediately. The new  format includes inventory on YouTube and Google's Display Network, which is comprised of thousands of publishers' sites and apps. Adweek reports that advertisers "first pre-plan and upload the creative they want to use and then can push out the content in real time."

Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer writes in Campaign U.S. that instead of being angry at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's (IAB) decision to bar Adblock Plus from its annual leadership meeting next week, just get angry over ad blocking in general. Schafer argues that AdBlock Plus isn't the victim--it takes money from some of the Web's biggest advertisers to get whitelisted on its service. "The real victim has been the consumer. The ad industry has created its own biggest weakness — a horrible experience for the consumers whose actions pay their bills..." Schafer argues. Traffic, he says is "harder and harder …