Strong demand from advertisers powered yet another better-than-expected quarter for Google parent Alphabet, Inc. Alphabet's revenue, fueled almost entirely by Google's advertising business, grew 21% from a year earlier to reach $21.5 billion in the second quarter, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Profit jumped 25%. "The main driver for Google’s second-quarter revenue growth was mobile, the company said, specifically from mobile search. Much of Alphabet’s revenue growth during the quarter came from the sites Google owns, such as its search engine and YouTube, rather than its network, through which it places advertising on sites and apps …

Artificial intelligence has rentered the world of real-time bidding. This week, Google brought machine learning into the process to help make it easier, according to a report in Computerworld  "Tapping some of the same A.I. technologies that have already appeared in Google Photos and AlphaGo, Smart Bidding is a new capability for conversion-based automated bidding across AdWords and DoubleClick Search to help companies determine their optimal bid for any given campaign or portfolio. It can factor in millions of signals, Google says, and continually refines models of users' conversion performance at different bid levels."

The Wall Street Journal does a great job of summing up the takeaways from Facebook's Q2 earnings bonanza. Mobile and video are fueling Facebook's growth to the point where the social network giant is running out of ad space to sell, according to the Journal report. Here are the takeaways: Facebook's audience is getting "bigger and bigger": It has 1.71 billion people using the network at least once a month, and daily active users on the site and app reached 1.13 billion on average for June, an increate of 17% from a year ago. Mobile represents 84% of its ad …

The Guardian has confirmed losses of £69m for the last financial year but said it was making significant progress in its membership strategy, with more than 50,000 people paying to sign up. Guardian Media Group chief executive David Pemsel said he expected digital advertising to improve over the current financial year, as the Guardian moves away from selling advertising based primarily on the scale of its audience to use more data and behavioral information. The company is also continuing to develop its Guardian Labs division, which creates sponsored and branded content for advertisers.

Rubicon Project has formed a partnership with "kid-safe" marketing platform SuperAwesome to create what they are claiming is the world's first kid-focused programmatic advertising exchange, according to a Business Insider report. "The launch of 'REX' means that marketers can now use Rubicon's automated tools to buy advertising to target children under the age of 13 online — with the guarantee that the ads they buy are safe and legal. To date, the entire online children's advertising market operated on a direct-deal basis, meaning advertisers couldn't use programmatic tools to buy ads targeted to children across a range of sites — …

More than 75% of U.S. senior marketers feel that understanding marketing technology has become increasingly important to their success, according to an eMarketer article. Nearly two-thirds of senior marketers in Western Europe agree. DataXu, Morar Consulting, and WithPR polled 532 senior marketers in the U.S., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. In addition, data from ad tech firm Rocket Fuel identified two marketing trends taking shape--programmatic buying of TV advertising and the rise of data management platforms--both key components of marketing technology.

While a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) this week found more than a quarter of U.S. internet users now employ online ad-blocking software on their desktop computers, the IAB said two-thirds of those ad-blocking users could be convinced to uninstall their ad-blocking software. The findings of the report, “Ad Blocking: Who Blocks Ads, Why, and How to Win Them Back,” were covered on Tuesday by Real-Time Daily. "Based on its findings, the IAB said the most effective ways publishers can convince consumers to disable ad blockers include limiting access to content for ad-blocking visitors, avoiding ads with …

Jana Jakovljevic, head of programmatic for Spotify, the streaming music service, spoke to Campaign US about the importance of targeted ads, the growth of the space, and whether agencies are optimized for programmatic ad buying. Despite its popularity, the Swedish company has lagged behind its competitors — Google Play, Pandora, Apple Music and iHeartMedia — in offering programmatic ad buying for marketers. At first, that option was limited to display and video. Now, the Swedish company is leading the way in programmatic for audio, too, according to Campaign. Here's what Jakovljevic says about programmatic's likely impact on the …

The Wall Street Journal asks: Does the addition of Yahoo really help Verizon/AOL compete with Google and Facebook in digital advertising? Mike Shields asked marketers and ad buyers questions about the deal. One question: Can Verizon really compete with the giants of digital advertising? "From the outset, the math doesn’t work. According to eMarketer, Yahoo will claim 3.4% of the U.S. digital ad market this year, an even smaller slice of the pie than in years past. AOL? 1.8%. Compare that with Google at almost 39% and Facebook with 15%, and it doesn’t look like a fair fight. The disparity …

YP announced  the release of its new location data visualization methodology, Audience Cartography, which allows multilocation businesses such as restaurants, retailers, and auto dealers to refine advertising campaign targeting and establish attribution, according to a report on Street Fight. "YP’s location data comes from several sources, including the information it collects from its own app as well as the in-app inventory it buys from the advertisers with which it partners. The company is also selective in the location data it actually uses for its client reports: YP discards almost 70 percent of the data at its …