Shaina Boone, OMD's managing director, marketing sciences, has strong views on viewability: "You don’t buy a car and get half the car. If you pay for it, you should get it. It’s not, 'We’re sorry, but the wheels aren’t included in this model.' The only way things might change is if people start to get audited and fined. But changing the infrastructure of an industry is a gigantic undertaking. There are some very large challenges ahead," Boone tells AdExchanger's Allison Schiff. Advertisers don't want to be asked to pay more for viewable impressions and managing their expectations can be tough. …

A report in The Economistoffers a different twist on ad blocking: It suggests that ad blocking might not spread as quickly to mobile phones as it has on desktops/notebooks. Some estimates suggest that in a few countries more than a third of Internet users have ad blockers installed on their browsers. Advertisers and publishers are even more concerned that ad blockers could impact advertising on smartphones, which will reach $100 billion this year globally, according to eMarketer. "Mobile browsers which block ads on web pages (though not in apps) have become more popular, particularly in Asia. The operating system for …

The Wall Street Journal'sMike Shields reports on a growing concern that bloated, large ads are slowing page load times and wreaking havoc on consumers' experience and thereby contributing to the ad-blocking epidemic. He reports that many publishers and agencies produce "oversized, tracking-laden digital ad files and often deliver them at the last minute without enough time for publishers to push back."  This often results in sluggish Web page load times and causes frustrated consumer to deploy ad blockers. Publishers and ad tech firms have been cast as the parties most responsible for ad blocking but, the report argues, ad agencies …

Publishers are on a hiring spree--they're looking for new talent to manage and coordinate relationships with platforms including Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat, according to The Wall Street Journal. As publishers integrate emerging platforms like these into their daily business, they're finding the need for specialists to coordinate all the relationships between social media, video, gaming and other real-time platforms including messaging apps.  "For example, Condé Nast International recently posted a job opening for a 'platform relationships manager' to help coordinate and deepen its relationships with social media and video platforms, messaging apps and even hardware manufacturers. The person appointed …

Writing in TechCrunch, Tarikh Korula, CEO of Katch explains that "live" and real-time media is pervasive from Twitter Moments to Twitch, Periscope and Meerkat, to Snapchat's Live Stories, Instagram Spotlights and more. It's the de facto way people are accessing news, games and real-time information and most importantly, sharing it with one another. Korula writes: "Live media is the most dynamic category of mobile storytelling developing today because it’s fast, immersive and consumable in the palm of your hand. It’s everything we love (and occasionally hate) about the internet – immediate, first person, and chaotic as hell. And it’s changing …

Ad tech veteran Pete LaFond, vice president of marketing at TruSignal, tells eMarketer senior analyst Lauren Fisher that while programmatic TV in the addressable TV space is a small-scale thing today, it has great potential going forward. He says that around 5% to 10% of TV inventory is both addressable and available for programmatic today. That is poised to change as cross-device measurement and attribution methods improve and gain traction in mobile. LaFond maintains that programmatic brings greater efficiencies to media and eventually, more marketers will dip their toes into programmatic TV.

Beet.TV reports that OpenX hopes its new Meta offering will clean up the multiple header partner playing field. Qasim Saifee, the company’s SVP, Monetization Platform, said the biggest problem is that most solutions are on the client side, meaning a user’s browser is sending signals to all header partners. “The more header partners you stuff inside your header, the heavier the page becomes,” Saifee told Beet.TV. “The more code you have on your page, the more likely it is there will be a challenge when it interacts with each other and that’s going to lead to a problem with your …

AdExchanger reports that Condé Nast plans to expand its programmatic offerings to give buyers more opportunities to use its first-party data along with header bidding to increase programmatic supply. The new offerings are positioned as "premium programmatic at scale". The publisher debuts the new offerings as its digital audience has grown (up 45% year-over-year) and buyers' behaviors change.

The Economist reports on concerns over ad fraud and fragmentation in the overly crowded ad tech space noting that programmatic media buying and selling was supposed to make online advertising easier. While in some ways, it has. In many ways, it's made the process more complex. "The trading of online ad slots is as complex as it is fiendishly fast. Thousands of firms jostle to analyse consumer data and buy, sell and monitor ads. Middlemen repackage 'inventory' (as ad slots are known in the business), then sell it to other middlemen. An ad impression sold programmatically can change hands 15 …

Will programmatic TV set the world on fire in 2016 and make upfronts a legacy practice? Not likely, but data-driven TV buying is on the move, according to a report on CampaignUS. Programmatic TV is on track to comprise a majority of the overall TV ad spend (which was estimated at $79 billion in 2015), but it could take a decade or more. Even the biggest proponents of programmatic TV say that the upfronts and human-based selling are likely to continue. Programmatic TV ad spending was just $50 million in 2014, about 0.1% of total TV ad dollars, according to …