AdExchanger reports that Index Exchange hired Drew Bradstock to serve as SVP, product. Bradstock comes to Index Exchange from Google where he spent the last five years as group product manager of Google’s Ad Exchange. One area of focus for Index Exchange is  header bidding, and Bradstock's mission will be to develop a forecasting tool that enables publishers to see the true value of their inventory, along with the exchanges where they will get the best price. A tall order. 

Linear TV is going programmatic. Starting this fall, NBCUniversal said it would make all of its inventory available for sale programmatically via its private exchanged dubbed NBCUx for Linear TV. NBCUx will offer media buyers data and automation to inform their buys across its entire cable and broadcast portfolio. The inventory won't be bid upon in an auction environment and no dynamically inserted ads will appear in primetime lineups, making the offering more of an automated reserved affair. This is the first time NBCUni has offered automated planning to its linear network ad inventory. “It is really meant to simplify …

A contentious panel at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona brought executives from the ad industry and Google face-to-face with Roi Carthy, the CMO of Shine, the mobile ad blocker startup. Earlier this month, Shine signed its first European carrier, Three Group, which will implement its ad blocking tech in multiple markets — starting with the UK and Italy. Shine also has signed Caribbean operator, Digicel, which rolled out the mobile ad blocking tech last year. "Google’s Benjamin Faes, MD, media & platforms, decried the rise of ad blockers and Shine’s network level blocker tech specifically, — arguing such moves risk the free content …

During a keynote discussion at Social Media Week, New York Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson compared using ad blockers to stealing a print issue from a newsstand, according to a report in Adweek. "Trying to use and get benefit of the Times' journalism without making any contribution to how it's paid is not good," he said. "Everything we do should be worth paying for. Everything should feel like it's HBO rather than a broadcast network." Thompson said the Times' subscription model only covers some of its costs.  The newspaper, along with most other publishers, is confronting the issue of ad …

After two European wireless carriers decided to begin blocking mobile ads, a new battle royale began taking shape between tech companies and telecom carriers. Three UK and Three Italia are working with Israeli company Shine Technologies on a platform that will block ads on mobile devices. The platform will eventually be rolled out to other wireless  carriers in the group. The issue became a hot topic at Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona.

In a refreshing interview with AdExchanger's Allison Schiff Omnicom Digital CEO Jonathan Nelson says programmatic sits at the heart of the revolution within agencies but that doesn't mean that creative has to get short-changed. Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nelson said programmatic buying is a “huge part of what the media landscape actually is... But what seems to have gotten lost is the human factor – the creative side of it. You can have the best targeting suite on the planet, you could find the exact right person, but if you don’t have the right message, what’s the point?” …

Rubicon Project's financials painted a positive picture--the company’s managed revenue hit $1 billion in 2015. "With a growing take rate, 22.6% for the year, that tallied up to $227.3 million, an 81% annual increase. The amount Rubicon takes from transactions on its exchange increased from 19.3% in Q4 of 2014 to 24.9% in Q4 of 2015. The company said that was due to an increase in RTB impressions and a shift away from static impressions, which represent its older ad network management business," according to a report in AdExchanger. Rubicon reported a Q4 profit of $20.4 million and a full-year …

Writing in AdExchanger, Tom Herman, CEO at DashBid, says header bidding is all anyone wants to talk about. "However, the way header bidding is being implemented makes it just waterfalling by a different name. Publishers must become more adept at using all the tools of inventory management and yield optimization to truly gain an advantage and make header bidding into a positive development." He goes on: "In header bidding, publishers load code on the page before content is loaded and before the ad server is called. That gives a “first look” at the available spot to preferred buyers before the …

Writing in AdExchanger, Walt Horstman, president of AudienceXpress, argues that while the flurry of activity around programmatic TV sparked some energy in the TV business, it has generated questions that must be addressed. "The answer to many of these questions is increased transparency across the programmatic TV landscape." Horstman argues for transparency in TV inventory and reporting: "Agencies and advertisers should have transparency of the source of TV inventory for their programmatic campaigns and through which channels, either direct or indirect, that inventory is secured. It is important to know if the campaign is being routed through different intermediaries before …

MoPub issued its Global Mobile Programmatic Trends Report. MoPub found that Fortune 1000 brands made up over 51% of ad spend on the MoPub exchange for the entire quarter, and Fortune 500 brands made up more than a third of spend. MoPub also found that more inventory was transacted through private marketplaces -- so that rather than selling their most valued supply through direct orders, many publishers opted to sell these impressions through private marketplaces to gain the efficiencies of a programmatic exchange. In Q4 2015, the report found there were 30% more private marketplace deals that saw 165% more …