In the wake of yesterday's story in the Journal about Publicis Groupe forming a training program for its employees in programmatic media buying, we noticed a related story, sort up, by Sarah Sluis in AdExchanger about ad tech flowing back to publishers. Sluis notes that while ad tech has long poached talent from agencies and publishers, people with publishing backgrounds have been returning to the media world recently. She reports: "Media companies are seeing an uptick in resumes from people with ad tech backgrounds. Plus, as companies have created programmatic roles, they’ve staffed them with people who have experience in …

AppNexus this week reported that Average CPMs on its platform rose sharply during the second half of 2015, from below 20 cents last summer to $1.60 by early fall, as invalid traffic was rejected under the company's anti-fraud efforts. AdExchanger reports that AppNexus’ Inventory Quality (IQ) initiative to clean up fraudulent or invalid inventory was highly effective. According to the report, the initial 500% price jump that came after the company's fraud purge was followed by a more modest 18% lift in December. “What was more surprising [than the initial slope] is the second increase you see in December, around the …

The Wall Street Journal's Mike Shields reports on an important, new initiative at Publicis Groupe: An online training program to bring employees up to speed on programmatic media buying and planning as quickly as possible. Vivaki IQ Academy, which launched a few weeks ago, offers a programmatic advertising curriculum designed to help educate media buyers. The Journal reports that more than 800 employees have signed up for online courses for which they will receive an "official" Vivaki Programmatic Certification. Publicis is offering the courses to all employees in the U.S. and will roll them out globally over the next several …

AdExchanger scores an exclusive interview with WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell who discusses the impact slowing economic growth is having on the ad sector. Sorrell says: "Worldwide GDP growth is low, certainly lower than pre-2008. We're seeing worldwide GDP growth levels at around 3.5%. I would call that the new normal. It will be likely to continue at that level. ...So we have low growth and low inflation. Therefore clients have very little pricing power, which means they're very focused on cost cutting. Procurement and finance rule."

AdExchanger spoke with Mark Smith, executive director of Verizon Ventures, about its investment in Qualia, a company that mines intent data. The telecom sector has doubled-down in ad tech investments as the telecos want more cross-screen data, dive into new services and revenue streams. Smith tells AdExchanger that Verizon invested in Qualia because it's a company that listens "to a lot of unique signals, which help them determine consumer intent. They themselves had already begun to marry that data up with cross-device data from BlueCava when that vendor relationship started early in 2015."  Verizon Ventures invested $5.5 million in Qualia. …

People who use adblockers when using the web could be some of the most valuable people to show ads to, according to a new report. The Guardian says the report’s authors say people who block ads could generate more money for publishers because they are likely to be tech savvy and in the “millennial” age range that advertisers want to reach, are less likely to be bots (computers posing as humans), and are likely to see fewer ads overall. "The irony of the conclusion is not lost on the authors, but they claim publishers can still make money from people …

At a Beet.TV event, Mac Delaney, formerly the programmatic head at Publicis’ SMG and now programmatic head at performance marketing agency Merkle told participants that agencies have been trying to centralize the programmatic function. But in reality programmatic needs to be decentralized, slowly due to many layers of complexity. "Delaney says agencies have been 'centralizing' in order to refine the skill set... You need to have a concentrated team that can refine best-in-class processes and realize ‘we’ve got to move slowly’ Don’t decentralise all at once," according to the Beet.TV report.

Programmatic transactions face challenges in China, according to an interview with ReachMax COO Charlie Wang published in eMarketer's daily newsletter. One of the biggest hurdles to doing programmatic in China is the lack of data from third-party DMPs (data management platforms). In the West, there are many DMPs. Wang told eMarketer that Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent  (referred to as the BATs) hoard data and aren't very open about using the data outside their ecosystem. "The reason that the BATs don't like to open their data is because they're worried that once they open it up, somebody may take it--cookie-level data …

AdExchanger reported that Google is realigning its advertiser product management team by consolidating its buy-side products under a single product leader. That leader is Brad Bender, an eight-year veteran Google product management executive who manages the Google Display Network (GDN). Now, he'll also oversee Google’s programmatic buying platform DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) and the ad server DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM). "The goal is to streamline product management and operations around Google’s programmatic products that serve advertisers by unifying workflow across DBM, GDN and DCM," sources with knowledge of the company told AdExchanger.

Fitting for this President's Day, Fusion reports on an interesting interview that Dstillery CEO Tom Phillips did with the radio show Marktplace about his company's ability to obtain the mobile device ID’s from the phones of Iowa caucus-goers to match them with their online profiles. Phillips said during the radio interview: "We watched each of the caucus locations for each party and we collected mobile device IDs... It’s a combination of data from the phone and data from other digital devices." Dstillery found some unusual tidbits: People who loved to grill or work on their lawns overwhelmingly voted for Trump …