This is a rather scary prophecy: Chris Altchek, founder and chief executive of Mic, tells the Wall Street Journal that it's only a matter of time before all content becomes branded content. "With a younger generation increasingly blocking online ads and avoiding TV altogether, Mic.com is instead betting heavily on branded content to help fund its news site designed for educated millennials," the paper reports. “I think branded content will be all forms of advertising in 15 years,” Altchek said during an episode of the WSJ Media Mix podcast. He said millennials “essentially don’t consume any advertising …

Judy Shapiro, CEO and founder of EngageSimply, a social marketing engagement company, and chief brand strategist at CloudLinux, argues in Ad Age that today's marketing automation platforms are supposed to make things easier for marketers but instead they're fraught with complexity. Shapiro says that the limitations of a configurable platform can limit real productivity. She maintains: "All platforms are configurable, allowing users alternate ways to get something done but confined by the options created by the developers who are, most decidedly, not practicing marketers. This limited set of options often doesn't line up with what marketers need to do. So …

Demandbase, a provider of Account-Based Marketing (ABM), announced an agreement to acquire data science company Spiderbook for an undisclosed sum. Spiderbook automates the identification of companies that are likely to buy, including those that are already in-market for a company's products and services. It then determines the right buyers within those accounts and uncovers buyer-specific insights to recommend personalized messages for sales teams to use. The combined offering extends Demandbase's leadership position in the rapidly expanding ABM category with the only end-to-end platform—helping companies identify, target, engage and sell to …

Advertising marketplace Rubicon Project on Thursday said its Chief Financial Officer Todd Tappin resigned to assume the role of President at another company. Current Chief Accounting Officer David Day has been named interim CFO while the company conducts a process to identify a full time successor. Day joined the company in 2013 and had been responsible for the company’s global accounting functions, including corporate accounting, financial systems, financial reporting, operational accounting, treasury, and internal controls. Prior to joining Rubicon Project, Day was Chief Accounting Officer at ReachLocal, a public digital advertising company, and Senior Vice President of Finance at Overture …

DataXu, a provider of programmatic marketing software and analytics, launched its Pre-Bid Viewability capability for video campaigns through partnerships with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. The product enables marketers to improve the viewability performance of video campaigns.  Earlier this year, DataXu announced a Pre-Bid Viewability capability for display campaigns in partnership with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, which integrates third-party viewability targeting and optimization.

Programmatic advertising still has some work to do on the education front. "Despite the hype around the automated-buying technique, research by digital agency Theorem found programmatic to account for just 8% of total media spend in the U.K. As part of overall marketing spend, that figure falls to sub 1%. The research conflicts with other studies, but raises a valid question. However much it’s touted as a towering automaton, here to disrupt the digital ad industry for good, could it be that programmatic adoption isn’t the unstoppable tide it’s been made out to be? PerformanceIN asked …

Audience tech firm YuMe announced a partnership with StickyADS.tv, a provider of video private exchange software. The integration between YuMe’s comprehensive demand-side platform, YuMe for Advertisers, and StickyADS.tv’s supply-side platform, is designed to offer advertisers and agencies access to premium video inventory online and on mobile around the world. The partnership includes access to over 105 billion monthly bid requests, in over 150+ private exchanges in 150 global locations, for 20 leading television broadcasters.

AdExchanger reports that Instagram announced Tuesday that it’s opening up its advertising Partner Program to a new category of member: media buyers. "The program today comprised of a set of about 50 vendors certified for Instagram’s ad tech, content marketing and community management services. Bringing media-buying services into the fold is the natural next move for Instagram as it tracks in Facebook’s footsteps, said George Manas, CEO of Resolution, an Omnicom-owned performance marketing agency and a newly minted Instagram ad program partner. Since Instagram shifted from a direct-buy model to a self-service, biddable model, Resolution has been talking with agency and …

AdExchanger's take on the Trustworthy Accountability Group's (TAG) anti-fraud program after more than 18 months of coalition-building: "The program allows members of the digital supply chain – buyers, sellers and third parties – to earn a seal in exchange for proving their processes are kosher. There are quite a few hoops to jump through, and for good reason, said Mike Zaneis, president and CEO of TAG, which was formed in 2014 as a cross-industry alliance comprised of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies." And different stakeholders have different requirements. "Advertisers …

"Some 41% of senior marketing professionals in Asia Pacific say they have already adopted programmatic buying into their media buying processes, a new industry report has revealed. Marketers in Australia lead the way with almost half (48%) using programmatic buying, followed by their colleagues in Japan and Singapore (46% each), but marketers in less mature countries are also considering its adoption." These are some of the key findings from a survey of 300 senior marketing decision-makers by Forrester Consulting on behalf of MediaMath.