James Curran, CEO and founder of STAQ, wrote an op-ed for AdExchanger saying programmatic TV and selling audiences cross-screen aren't quite living up to expectations yet. Most programmatic TV still takes manual planning, trafficking and reporting, Curran wrote, adding, "Cross-screen is even farther from a reality, where contract, delivery, optimization, measurement and billing are all done completely differently on TV compared to digital channels." Streamlined pricing, as well as building a powerhouse first-party audience across channels, should be priorities, Curran wrote.

Intermarkets, an ad solution provider for advertisers, political campaigns and publishers, is gearing up for "unprecedented levels” of political advertising spend, said Erik Requidan, the company's VP-sales and programmatic strategy, Intermarkets, “Our header integrations are a way to create unified view of our inventory for our buy-side partners to understand,” Requidan told BeetTV. “The way a lot of publishers had structured themselves was to say, ‘Premium goes this way and non-premium goes that way.’ The reality is, there is a lot of lost opportunity there.”

Norwegian company Opera is introducing a version of its desktop browser that includes built-in ad-blocking features. It claims to get 45% faster loading times than Chrome with AdBlock and 21% faster than Firefox with Adblock. The twist: Opera relies on advertising for a big part of its revenue. A spokeswoman for Opera said the company didn't see a contradiction in introducing ad-blocking control features in its products.

Netflix, HBO and Amazon don't have ads on their streaming platforms. But for those platforms that do include ads, such as Hulu or YouTube, viewers complain about the same ads playing again and again. TechHive's Jared Newman explains why this occurs -- and if it's going to change anytime soon.

Re/code reports that a startup called Immserv is launching a platform allowing developers of VR content to promote that content with ads. Confusing? The gist is that people have a hard time finding VR content because the medium is very new, so the ad works like YouTube pre-roll, teasing to another game or piece of content.  There are challenges, of course, in advertising to people while they wear virtual reality headsets. Eric Hine, executive producer for Archiact Interactive (a partner of Immserv's), says you can turn off customers if you’re not careful. 

It will finally happen next year: eMarketer research predicts total digital ad spend will surpass TV for the first time. TV spend will total $72 billion in 2017, compared to a digital spend of $77 billion. Additionally, eMarketer has lowered its growth projections for TV ad spending since its previous forecast, saying TV will grow 2.5% this year, compared to 4.5% forecast in Q3 2015. eMarketer senior forecasting analyst Martín Utreras said positive growth for TV ad spend is still expected, but more ad money may flow to digital "as a way of optimizing spending in what may be a challenging economic year."

Quantcast’s CEO and co-founder, Konrad Feldman, and its Austalia/New Zealand managing director, Andrew Double, talked to CMO Australia about why marketers need to embrace three things: split-funnel attribution, retargeting and programmatic.“Programmatic is very new and attribution is even newer," Double said. "But in time people will be allocating more budget to what we believe provides incremental value to the plan.” The pair talk about the importance of having a willingness to experiment and getting the best scale of return for ad spend for clients. 

Bloomberg's Angie Lau discusses the three biggest programmatic players in China right now: the Google of China, Baidu; the Facebook of China, Tencent; and the Amazon of China, Alibaba. Those three account for 90% of the programmatic market, with Alibaba generating 60%. Lau also talks about mobile, which will present both opportunities and challenges for programmatic. There are 600 million Chinese Internet users, and 80% of them access the Web over mobile. There's no universal cookie to track over mobile, Lau said, so programmatic folks are going to have to figure that out. 

A year after Publicis Groupe decentralized its trading desk, VivaKi AOD, and reassigned employees to other jobs, the company is still recovering from the loss of talent. According to AdExchanger's Zach Rodgers, 50 of the 90 employees transferred to positions at Starcom Mediavest Group, ZenithOptimedia and Digitas ended up finding jobs outside Publicis. Some even went to competing agencies.

The New York Times has joined the list of publications experimenting with the messaging ad-blocking visitors see. One message says, "The best things in life aren’t free.” Forbes and Wired have also done testing. Without naming specific approaches, a spokeswoman said the Grey Lady plans to explore technology-based solutions to counteract the effect of ad blockers and legal avenues.