Spotify used to place its focus exclusively on its ad-free music streaming product, which it used to encourage people to sign up for its subscription service. Now, the company is leaning much harder into advertising, adding products, partners and staffers, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Last month, for example, Jeff Levick, the company's chief revenue officer, hired Liberty Carras Kelly, a former Fox and CNN executive, as Spotify’s new head of Americas sales, and former Vevo vice president of commercial marketing, Danielle Lee, as Spotify’s vice president of global partner solutions. Spotify’s ad sales revenue …

Publishers have sacrificed performance in favor of data and revenue for years. Now, as a result, Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles have, for all intents and purposes, taken over Web publishing. The new landscape raises serious ethical questions for news media, according to Bloomberg reporter Michael Keller in a post on Medium. Some data-driven or interactive stories, “ask readers questions about themselves and use that data to personalize the resulting narrative." This information could potentially wind up in an advertising profile or third-party data set if platforms host the content.

Writing for Campaign, Infectious Media CTO  Dan de Sybel says Amazon, Google, and Facebook have erected closed marketplaces around their user data that make it harder for brands to do programmatic themselves.  "Delivering campaigns across a number of different platforms slows down the execution process. Managing each platform’s ad inventory also makes it difficult to cap frequency across the campaign as a whole, as is knowing when and how to redistribute money between them to optimise performance. Finally, how can you truly understand the path your users take to conversion if each platform uses its own unique cookie space and …

Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, regales us with his take on some eye-popping data points. For one, there's the Interactive Advertising Bureau(IAB)/PwC's recent quarterly U.S. advertising report, which was followed by a press release from the IAB noting that Q1 206 U.S. Internet ad revenues hit a record after the highest growth in four years for a “21% rise over the same time period in 2015.” Kint states, "We don’t dispute this number. We just think it’s important to highlight that only two IAB members are benefiting from this increasingly lopsided ecosystem." Kint elaborates: "Using Facebook …

Michelle DeVine, programmatic sales manager at Vox Media, told Portada that that a large advertiser expects to put about 90% of political video ad dollars to work in private marketplaces (PMPs) and only 10% into programmatic guaranteed inventory. Programmatic guaranteed inventory, while still bought in a programmatic way, is mostly agreed upon via a direct salesperson. Using PMPs, media buyers usually bid in a real-time auction, which makes the process much more competitive for media properties like Vox.

Collective, a data-driven programmatic ad-tech firm, announced that it closed a $34 million growth round led by Columbia Partners with participation from Accel Partners, Greycroft and iNovia, according to a report on TechCrunch. The new funding round will be dedicated to the company’s new product, Visto.  The recently launched platform is designed to bring more transparency to ad tech.  Collective's Visto offers a dashboard where users can pull information such as suspicious activity broken down by supply-side platforms, demand-side platforms, and publisher direct. Joe Apprendi, CEO of Collective, wants to focus on display and video ads first, according to the report. With …

Facebook is creating a “global brand partner” team to help promote its ad-serving offering Atlas, with Forrester research demonstrating that over a billion people log into the social network across a number of devices every 90 days, according to a report in The Drum. Using Atlas, Facebook is looking to take on Google’s ad stack, which currently dominates the market. Facebook began the rollout of Atlas last year. It purchased the ad-serving product in 2013.

People are still talking about IBM Corp.'s 2015 acquisition of The Weather Company. Why did IBM buy it? Market Watch reports: "On Wednesday, IBM revealed its first joint product with The Weather Company: a hyperlocal weather forecast—at a 0.2-mile to 1.2-mile resolution—to provide enterprise clients with short-term customized forecasts. It’s hoping to include this service, dubbed Deep Thunder, as part of a growing suite of products offered to enterprise clients through its Watson arm. Deep Thunder combines big data and machine-learning tools from IBM Research with The Weather Company’s global forecasting model, which includes more than 195,000 personal weather stations. …

Mobile data exchange Adsquare is launching a partnership with The Trade Desk, a demand-side platform, to give advertisers, trading desks, and agencies access to adsquare's data. The pre-bid integration is designed to enable the bid stream in real time and will allow The Trade Desk's customers to target on the current context and within "mobile moments."

Out-of-Home (OOH) agency Posterscope USA is pivoting to focus on dynamic creative, real-time planning and buying, and advanced audience measurement, all supported by investment in technology, data, and senior talent. The agency is integrating the recently acquired Liveposter technology platform in the U.S. allowing brand advertisers to deliver data-driven, targeted digital content at scale and across multiple OOH operators. Kenneth Brinkmann will lead a dedicated team responsible for helping clients use the Liveposter technology.  Posterscope formally acquired Liveposter and its platform last month after using the technology platform in a number of campaigns executed for marquee brands such as …