Programmatic adoption is stalled in Germany as most marketers think automation puts their control of data at risk, according to a report in eMarketer's daily newsletter. According to Dec. 2015 YouGov survey for the ad tech firm Adform, 88% of marketing decisionmakers in Germany believe retaining control over their own marketing data is important in the long-term. As a result, 52% of respondents to the survey said they weren't buying ads yet programmatically and had no plans to do so. Their caution also stems from a lack of transparency with nearly one-third of those polled saying they had no clear …

The New York Times Sunday Review finally addressed the ad blocking wars, bringing up the "verbal grenades" lobbed against ad blockers by Interactive Advertising Bureau President and CEO Randy Rothenberg. Roi Carthy, the CMO of Shine, an Israeli company that recently began offering ad blocking software to wireless carriers called ad blocking a "holy war" for his company. Wireless carriers are growing tired of data-sucking ads that take a long time to load on their networks. Shine is partly financed by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing who also has stakes in Facebook, Spotify and …

On CMO.com, Vincent Blaney, European brand director, media and digital at Millward Brown, maintains that in order to combat ad blocking the industry needs to focus on battling ad receptivity with better content. Millward Brown's global AdReaction study contains many tips on how marketers can re-align their approach to stop a potential descent into an ad-blocked world. While consumers have a greater amount of control than ever, that "does not necessarily equal giving consumers the full power over a website’s ads. It can also mean offering consumers a choice about which types of ads they see, and presenting them with …

Gigaom takes a deep look at what's next in the ad blocking wars and how ad blocking will affect marketing this year. Gigaom concludes: "Lest there is any question, ad blocking will not prompt an all-out surrender by the ad ecosystem. Some publishers, like GQ, Forbes and more recently Wired, are fighting fire with fire, by blocking users with ad blockers. But the longer term strategy is to address the issues with ad experience. Some of this responsibility falls on publishers, who determine the degree of disruption that must be tolerated to access …

Another day, another ad blocker. The Telegraph reports that European mobile company Three is signing a deal with Shine, a company that can block digital ads on mobile Web pages and in apps. It remains unclear how Three will implement the ad blocker but it could require publishers like  Facebook or Google to pay for the ability to show ads, or offer mobile customers ad-free plans at a higher price. Regarding the move, The Wall Street Journal notes the deal is similar to wireless firm Digicel's move to block online ads in its Caribbean and South Pacific networks.

CIO asks this question as marketing has shifted from a primary focus on brand awareness and lead generation to the convergence of acquisition and retention capabilities across the entire customer lifecycle, from the moment a potential shopper searches online to years after they swiped their credit card. Marketing is now "at the confluence of action/conversion strategies pre-purchase and marketing/CRM strategies post-purchase," Rusty Warner, a Forrester analyst who specializes in marketing technologies, tells CIO. To achieve long-term customer relationships companies must focus on cross-device identity resolution. “Companies need to match anonymous with known customer profiles and make sure they are consistent …

Amid the layoffs this week at Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, the company's embattled CEO, said programmatic will be a top priority. On the company's Q4 earnings call in early Feb. she said Yahoo’s global sales team “has been training and scaling from traditional premium-focused sales to performance and programmatic offerings," AdExchanger reported. As part of that plan, Mayer said that Yahoo is “streamlining our sales support and operations teams and simplifying our international organization to focus on fewer ad products.” Yahoo's board approved a 15% cut in its workforce, the first of those cuts began last week and continued on Wednesday …

Marketers are looking to make their data work harder but hurdles remain, as eMarketer reports. Research from the IAB and Winterberry Group surveyed 120 U.S. digital marketing and media practitioners to find that one-third of respondents said lack of internal experience at the functional and operational level was a major obstacle in deriving substantive value from data-driven marketing and media efforts in 2016. In addition, they cited lack of volume and quality of first-party data resources.

Campaign U.S.' Todd Wasserman conjectures that programmatic creative may be the beginning of "artificial creativity" He cites job losses at AOL at Magna Global's projection thatby 2017, 80% of advertising will be bought programmatically. And even TV ad sales are going the way of programmatic. Wasserman's piece asserts that artificial intelligence "is accelerating at such a rate that some argue within 15 years or so, traditional creative advertising functions like dreaming up taglines and ad campaigns may be done by computers." And while it's still a ways off, some creative is already being taken over by bots. Is this sending …

The Wall Street Journal Reports that podcasts, while a hit with listeners who devour their rich content, are suffering as large advertisers hold back on investing in them due to concerns over scale, metrics, targeting and measurement. The paper reports that advertising revenue growth has been limited by a range of problems "not unlike the issues that online media faced in its early days. It’s difficult to measure how many people actually tune into a podcast, let alone listen to hosts promoting its sponsors. Ads in podcasts are relatively expensive, so it’s tough for brands beyond direct-response advertisers to determine …