AdExchanger's Allison Schiff reports on the growing pains of mobile viewability and the effort to develop a standard. She notes that the Media Ratings Council (MRC) is planning to circulate a document for public comment in the next few weeks as vendors continue to experiment with various tactics. A quote from Joe Barone, GroupM’s managing partner of digital ad ops and a member of the MRC’s Digital Committee: "There’s a tremendous amount of work that goes into technical integration – and in any case, you’re never going to get two measurements that are exactly the same.”

Lotame SVP and CMO Doron Wesly told Beet.TV that TV makers are in a good position to leverage ad tech to benefit from connected TV platforms. Citing recently published Nielsen quarterly data, Wesly says: “50% of US households have SVODs. This is not a fad. That space needs a TV DMP (data management platform)… for agencies who are trying to create smarter plans for clients.” A DMP enables ad buyers mix up data sources to create audience segments for ad targeting which is what Lotame offers its customers. Wesly suggests that TV hardware makers are in the best …

Web analytics firm Moat has raised $50 million in new funding. Aiming to take on Google, Nielsen, comScore and other digital media companies, Moat will develop a standard metric that would serve as the currency for buying and selling digital ads. Moat is known for tracking viewability to determine whether online ads are seen by real people and not robots. Now Moat wants to help advertisers and publishers assess whether people pay attention to digital ads and are influenced by them. The goal is to have advertisers negotiate ad deals using the new metric rather than billing advertisers "based on …

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the racial and gender compositions of the major holding companies in the wake of a sexual harassment suit brought by a female employee against the CEO of J. Walter Thompson, who resigned last week. The Journal reports that government data indicate that African-Americans and Hispanics are underrepresented among the advertising and public relations industries, but that more granular data can be tougher to come by. "The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission collects demographic information annually from each company about its workforce in the U.S., including data on race and gender. But companies are …

Writing on LinkedIn, Rob Norman, Chief Digital Officer, GroupM, Chairman GroupM North America, remarks that while ad blocking is freaking out both publishers and advertisers, there are many theories that try to explain the rise of adblocking. Norman mentions "latency of site performance, the cost of data for rendering ads, the clutter of sites, a resistance to ad tracking, irritation at being retargeted with a product already purchased and so on. Some or all of these are true some of the time." But he also notes that there's a different force in play--the simply "because I can" theory. Norman argues …

AdExchanger reports that more agencies are hiring people with experience in ad tech. The misconception is that agencies have to retrain them. But when you have people who started out at agencies, have spent time in ad-tech firms and then boomerang back to agencies, they're uniquely positioned to fill the programmatic talent gap. They know ad tech, understand agency relationships, client relationships and are data-savvy.

Street Fight features an interview with Drawbridge founder Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan who discusses the confusion over the meaning and definition of "programmatic," which he says, "has led the charge for cross-device." Sivaramakrishnan tells Annie Melton: "Yes, the simplest synonym for programmatic is automation. For example, when a marketer buys into a Facebook or Google environment in an automated fashion using their API, that’s programmatic. But the real-time bidding ecosystem, wherein targeting is much more precise because it’s an open economy under which targeting capabilities are enacted, is also a programmatic implementation. So there needs to be an understanding, from a …

The Guardian reports that a number of major news websites have seen ads hijacked by a malicious campaign that attempts to install “ransomware” on computers, according to a warning from security researchers Malwarebytes.  The attack, which was targeted at U.S. consumers, hit sites including the New York Times, the BBC, AOL and the NFL last weekend. Combined, the targeted sites have traffic in the billions of visitors. The malware was delivered through multiple ad networks. When an infected ads hit users, it redirects the page to servers hosting the malware, which includes the widely-used Angler exploit kit. "The kit …

Advertising could account for about half of data usage for people reading articles on their smartphones, according to a study by Enders Analysis. The Guardianreported that the study looked at six unnamed “popular publishers," both with and without an ad blocker, and found that anywhere between 18% and 79% of the data downloaded was from ads. In addition, anywhere between 6% and 68% of the downloaded data was from JavaScript, which is used to deliver more interactive elements of both editorial and advertising on pages. The report said: “On the basis of this investigation, an estimate that says advertising …

The world of measurement tools is on the move with Facebook's recent announcement about Lift API, which it says will enable more advertisers, Facebook's marketing partners and other third-party measurement partners to create their own lift studies for conversion rates, sales and mobile app installs, according to an Adweekreport. Lift API builds on the Facebook's Lift measurement tool announced in January 2015. That tool has been deployed by 1,000 businesses in various industries to gauge Facebook ads' effectiveness across their objectives. Facebook is also testing new fields/categories in its ad reporting, which "will help advertisers understand which ads people …