"Criteo, the France-based ad tech company, filed a lawsuit on Monday that alleges rival firm SteelHouse ran a 'counterfeit click fraud scheme' that led to 'substantial injury and damage' to its business and reputation," according to a report in Business Insider. U.S.-based SteelHouse and Criteo are rivals in the digital advertising space. Criteo is a public company with more than $1 billion in revenue in 2015, while SteelHouse is a private firm. It raised $63.55 million in funding, according to CrunchBase.  Both companies place ads by "retargeting," dropping a cookie on a user's browser when they've visited a Web site, …

DataXu on Monday announced the appointment of Tore Tellefsen as vice president of TV solutions. Tellefsen's hiring comes as the company expands its programmatic footprint across all devices and formats to encompass television, a move it began last year with the launch of its OneView cross-device marketing software. Sky invested $10 million investment in DataXu this year to help advertisers leverage data science to buy TV ads programmatically. Tellefsen served more than eight years at Microsoft, where he was director of video advertising, and prior to that spent six years at programmatic television (PTV) provider Navic Networks, which Microsoft acquired …

Transparent Media Partners, a marketing technology consultancy, said it will offer complimentary assessments of programmatic media efforts for marketers that want a neutral perspective. The announcement comes just days after the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) released its report detailing ad fraud, rebates and transparency issues. Transparent founder Andrew Swinand says that the assessment is a good first step for marketers that want to rebuild trust with their agencies and tech partners: "Neutrality is the defining difference in our offering," he stated. "In this environment of skepticism, we seek to be a neutral partner to brands …

Spending on programmatic display advertising is rising in Germany, and is expected to more than double in 2016 from investment two years ago, according to data from Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW). Net ad spending on programmatic placements was $298 million in 2014, it rose 45% in 2015 amounting to $433 million, and should hit $628 million in 2016. The high growth comes despite the fact that programmatic decision-makers polled in Dec. 2015 by YouGov and Adform said they had too little control over their own data, and 42% cited a lack of transparency about how advertiser data is used by …

More B2B marketers are dipping their toes into the programmatic media game as they seek to boost efficiency and improve targeting. A study by Kantar Media and Connectiv found that 79% of U.S. B2B marketers expected to purchase at least some portion of their 2016 digital display ad budget programmatically. That's a 2% increase over those who responded the same in 2015. Further, the percentage of respondents planning to spend 45% or more of their budget on programmatic digital display increased from 27% to 33% over the same period.

Writing in Street Fight, Lynn Tornabene, CMO of AffinityX, argues that agencies struggling to keep up with client demands for programmatic integration intimidate smaller companies that "may feel that if the big international corporations can’t get a grasp on programmatic, then smaller agencies or media companies don’t stand a chance." Further, "in reality, local media companies (such as newspapers, broadcast and cable) and agencies will actually have a much easier time sidestepping some of these challenges to bring programmatic to their advertising customers. The difficulty on the big agency side boils down to infrastructure."

Tech firms are selling software designed to counteract the impact of ad blocking. "PageFair, Sourcepoint, Secret Media and Admiral are among the companies currently in the market pitching publishers that technology. The companies are taking somewhat different approaches to the issue, but they all promise media companies one thing: to help recapture revenues lost because of ad-blocking users," the Wall Street Journal reports.

A study by tech researcher Technavio projects that the real-time bidding (RTB) market in the U.S. will reach more than $46 billion in revenue by 2020. The report offers an in-depth analysis of market growth and emerging market trends. To calculate the market size, Technavio researchers considered revenues generated from the sales of online advertisements through RTB. The report also presents a landscape of the top four vendor players and lists other prominent vendors in the market. The report found that RTB mobile advertising on mobile Web applications accounted for 33% of the total market in 2014 and 41% of …

At Slate, Dan Gillmor says he's a "big believer" in ad blocking, but he's wary of telecommunications providers offering to block ads on consumers' behalf. "That’s where we may be heading if a U.K.–based mobile operator, Three, pulls off an 'experiment' it’s conducting next week. For customers who opt in to the program, Three will attempt to block all advertising for a day. Three, one of the companies in Hong Kong mega-billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s sprawling empire, is touting this as a consumer-friendly initiative and in one respect there’s truth in that. The surge of ad and tracking blockers is testament …

Cedato launched its Open Video API, a programming interface for Cedato’s smart video player and a framework for rapidly developing native video advertising experiences.  Cedato’s Open Video API was designed to enable the company’s partners and customers to quickly build a whole range of native video ad products with built-in support for any screen and device. Cedato produced a set of native video ad units that will show how to create and implement incremental native video within existing non-video content and feeds. The ads will enable Cedato partners to expand their inventory and seamlessly integrate into their own platforms, …