Telecom giant Verizon has emerged as a leading contender to take over Internet pioneer Yahoo as other big names reportedly drop out. Research firm eMarketer forecast that digital ad revenue taken in this year at Yahoo will fall nearly 14% to $2.83 billion, while money raked in by Silicon Valley rivals Google and Facebook will rise. "A leaner Yahoo, more focused on its core growing segments, will still face stiff competition in an ever more crowded and sophisticated market," eMarketer analyst Martin Utreras told AFP.

While programmatic advertising is growing in China, data management platforms (DMPs) are also increasingly important there, according to an eMarketer article. The research firm projects nearly $10 billion in programmatic ad spending this year in China. Research by ZenithOptimedia and Nielsen in 2015 found that a quarter of China's advertisers said having a DMP in place was important, while 62% called it a "very important" priority, with just 15% indicating that working with a DMP was of minimal importance.

Adweek reports that Twitter is making it easier for larger brands to target smaller groups. The company updated its ads editor to include an Ad Groups function that enables marketers reach smaller segments within a larger group, with more detailed targeting criteria and target-specific creative. Prior to the change, Ad Groups was only available through Twitter's API. The new feature is designed to offer more control for campaigns while measuring results based on audience and schedule.

MediaMath has launched the New Marketing Institute (NMI), the company’s education and training arm, in the Asia Pacific region, according to a release. Starting this month, NMI will bring to APAC programs to help train marketers across different levels of digital marketing proficiency in programmatic technologies.

Lotame CEO Andy Monfried tells AdExchanger the company has a big advantage over a few of its peers: “We have about 4 billion cookies and about 2.5 billion device IDs we’re sitting on,” he said. “When we onboard a client, we can immediately show them everything else about a profile that they may not have known. That’s all inside of DMP – it’s not another service or product we add on. It’s our core focus.” That focus is marrying online and offline data sets for its clients, data management platform (DMP) companies, including publishers, advertisers and information service companies. …

Writing in a post for the Native Advertising Institute, Robert Wildner, VP of media operations, glispa GmbH, says programmatic mobile native isn't poised to take off this year. Why? Challenges include standards, which are a "work in progress," Facebook and Google's "walled gardens," and issues involving scale. Native advertising can be a "time-consuming" process which needs to be "repeated for each platform," he writes.

Marketing Land reports: "As programmatic has become the buying method of choice for online display advertising — overtaking manual digital ad buying last year, according to eMarketer — Neil Sweeney, president and CEO of programmatic mobile ad platform JUICE Mobile, argues that the industry is  too wholeheartedly embracing RTB (real-time bidding) and not considering the ramifications of ignoring direct buying channels like programmatic direct, or considering both sources together."

Research by RBC Capital Markets, finds that more than a quarter of programmatic decisions are made by agencies for their advertisers--up from 20% since September, 2015. Mark Mahaney, the company's managing director, reported the findings at AdExchanger'sPROGRAMMATIC I.O conference last week. "The biggest issue is that, in general, the agency needs are not aligned with what the advertiser wants,” commented Randy Cohen, president and COO of Advertiser Perceptions. One challenge for agencies is that marketing-tech investments are controlled by marketers, perhaps aided by service providers and consultants like PwC and Deloitte Digital, according to Randy Wootton, CEO of Rocket …

Despite all the cord-cutting and subscriptions to live-streaming services like Netflix, the Wall Street Journal reports that the TV upfront season could see a modest increase of 3% to 5% in ad-spending commitments from buyers. This constitutes a reversal of fortunes: for the last three years, there have been declines in ad spending on broadcast TV, and two years of declines in cable.

Ooyala general manager Scott Braley spoke with eMarketer about how marketers are using programmatic, social and mobile to increase viewability. Ooyala offers viewability metrics and sell-side programmatic platforms to marketers. Braley says that when marketers are looking to enter a private programmatic marketplace, viewability criteria are  an important consideration. Marketers are eager to understand viewability metrics in their direct and programmatic ad buys, and have a big opportunity to optimize for viewability in programmatic.