MediaMath Global CMO Joanna O'Connell talks about the next generation of data-driven marketing, the role of marketing leadership and how she's proving the value of the marketing function. She says: "As programmatic becomes more scaled and as brand marketers start to understand its potential to positively impact them, they’re asking more questions. For better or worse, they’re questioning the value of different parties they work with, including agencies. Simultaneously, you’re seeing marketers seeing enormous value in first-party data. The better they are with that, the better they’ll do in the long run in terms of delivering good customer experiences and …

Marketing data provider Acxiom is now making its turnkey environment,  which fully integrates its LiveRamp acquisition from 2014, generally available, according to Marketing Land. The new offering is called the Acxiom Marketing Analytics Environment (AMAE) and has been available since last July, but only to selected clients. "Now, AMAE offers a standardized, ready-to-go environment for collecting, combining, managing, analyzing, modeling, and exporting big data from multiple sources, both online and offline. The company says that standing up a data collection and analysis environment for a brand can now be accomplished in days or weeks, instead of months or even years."

AdExchanger interviews David Jakubowski, Facebook's head of ad tech, about how Facebook is keeping fraud out of its Audience Network. Commenting on Facebook's cutting ties with many of its LiveRail partners because of ad fraud issues, he says:"We’ve been very transparent about how low-quality the inventory is, and it’s because we look at it through a value-based lens. We’ve also been public about the pieces of the business we aren’t going to continue to support because of it. And we shut down a lot of inventory. We pulled back on our buying initiative that was designed for open exchange buying. …

AdExchanger reports: "SAP entered the digital advertising market this week, creating a DSP and DMP from scratch it’s dubbing SAP Exchange Media (XM). Wolfgang Faisst, co-founder and head of SAP XM, acknowledged that despite an ecosystem of 'thousands of ad tech companies,' SAP decided to step up because of demand for end-to-end integration. Because SAP XM connects with SAP’s ecommerce platform hybris and other back office software, it can deploy a company’s data seamlessly and in privacy-safe ways for advertising campaigns. Campaigns end up with more precise targeting and measurement."

Aiming to capture a larger part of a growing native programmatic marketplace in North America, Xaxis, WPP's programmatic media and advertising platform, will tap its German native advertising arm, plista, Adweek reports. Plista, based in Berlin, will offer advertisers a single source for buying outstream video, "which plays outside of video content—between paragraphs of text, for example—along with other formats for both mobile and desktop. According to the companies, adding the increasingly popular ad unit to the existing scale of Xaxis will let advertisers use the same data and audience segments for what they already do with digital and display."

Altitude Digital, a programmatic video platform for publishers, announced that Chris Coelho, Matt Douglas and Jawaan Wright have joined the company to help grow the number of advertisers buying through the new Altitude ARENA Programmatic Video Platform, according to a release. Altitude has made a significant investment in the development of its technology to streamline the connection between publishers and advertisers and has redefined the capabilities of traditional supply-side platforms (SSPs) with ARENA. These new hires join Altitude following the recent announcement the company has secured $17.5 million of financing to further expand its technology and team. The platform allows …

A really cool look at a media buyer's experience during the busy upfront season from The New York Times. Carrie Drinkwater, director of investment activation for the agency MullenLowe Mediahub, has been attending the upfronts for two decades and let a reporter tag along with her. First stop on Monday: 10:45 a.m., NBCUniversal's event at Radio City Music Hall. "Ms. Drinkwater arrives at the 50th Street entrance to Radio City after taking a 5:20 a.m. train from Boston, where she works. As she enters the music hall, she says she loves the upfronts because there’s 'a lot of energy.' She …

As much as $12 billion in digital advertising revenue in the U.S. could be lost if Web users continue taking up adblocking at the current rate, according to a report in The Guardian. "A forecast by analytics firm Optimal says more than 43 million people in the U.S. will use an ad blocker this year, taking more than $3.8 billion (£2.63m) out of the digital ad industry. At the current rate of growth, that figure will more than triple to over $12 billion by 2020 when more than 100 million U.S. web users will be blocking ads. Optimal said its …

AdExchanger reports that since Google opened up its ad server and brought exchange bidding to dynamic allocation, a month ago, publishers, ad tech and media companies have been asking many questions but receiving few answers. "People in the industry want to know: How much will Google charge? Nobody seems to know. What kind of data will publishers be able to access? Unclear. Where is the proof that Google won’t prefer itself over everyone else? Nobody’s seen it. Since Google hasn’t adequately answered questions about how the project will work, AppNexus has preemptively decided not to participate. Instead, the company is …

Adotas speaks with John Nardone, CEO of Flashtalking, about the art and science of programmatic advertising. Nardone is asked about his journey to help brands embrace data and technology: "At Modem Media we worked with AT&T to place the very first banner ad on HotWire. More recently at x+1 we helped brands harness their first party date to make consumer interaction more relevant across owned and paid media. In doing so we helped the industry to understand the power of DMPs [data management platforms] and spurred the wide adoption of the technology today. Now, we are really seeing that data …