Bloomberg reports on Facebook and Google's obvious advantages. They're the "800-pound gorillas in online advertising because of audience reach and superior targeting. They enjoy another lesser-known advantage: they're largely immune to ad blocking." Why? "Facebook is a textbook example of how technology enshrines advantage. While it was prey to ad blockers when most users preferred computers, it's played a blinder in the shift to mobile. The ads within the mobile Facebook app (and its photo-sharing app Instagram) can't be stripped out by blockers. They're delivered by Facebook servers with none of the usual identifiers." This gives Facebook an advantage. Facebook and Google's move to mobile …

This spring, "Google announced a new ad product which most people in the advertising industry saw as a move designed to stamp out 'header bidding,' one of the newest pieces of technology ad tech companies and publishers have been using in an attempt to carve away at DoubleClick's monopoly," according to a report in Business Insider. Header bidding essentially lets Google's rivals jump to the front of the line in the contest for ad slots. Now, Google's testing a program that gives a few ad exchanges that compete with its own, AdX, access to Google's Dynamic Allocation product called EBDA (exchange …

A new eMarketer report, "Cracking Cross-Device Attribution in 2016: Data Quality, Blended Models Merging Online And Offline Data," contends that marketers have been slow to adopt the tactics that would help them account for ROI and data for each channel they use. Lack of knowledge, experience, and an inability to justify the pricetag for the technology were cited as factors. But that may be changing: A January 2016 survey conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that cross-channel measurement and attribution were the most cited tactics expected to occupy marketing and media professionals' time and resources in 2016.

Writing on the Turn blog, Matt Westover, the company's vice president of product marketing, described the emerging brand Blue Apron (not a household name) and how it's managing to raise brand awareness among a niche audience. He argues that reaching the audience for this type of brand may have been challenging years ago, but now, with "data-based targeting, lookalike audiences and online video, it’s possible to reach a market niche effectively, quickly and in a scalable way." Westover writes that: "Analog marketing relied on demographics and instances in which consumers declared an affinity by consuming certain forms of niche media …

Brave Software said it's raised $4.5 million to help grow its ad-blocking, privacy-centric Web browser, which aims to nullify many of the ad targeting and tracking techniques now commonplace in online advertising, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The report indicates that the funding round, from investors including Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group, brings the company’s total fundraising in the last year to $7 million. "Brave, which was launched last year, is a web browser that speeds page loading times by stripping away ads and blocking tracking …

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Pro Publica's Julia Angwin writes that while algorithms are "ubiquitous in our lives," "they are also being employed to inform fundamental decisions about our lives" and that's a bit ominous. Angwin writes: "Companies use them to sort through stacks of résumés from job seekers. Credit agencies use them to determine our credit scores. And the criminal justice system is increasingly using algorithms to predict a defendant’s future criminality. Those computer-generated criminal 'risk scores' were at the center of a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that set the first …

Brave Software just raised $4.5 million to expand its ad-blocking Web browser, The Wall Street Journal reports. The startup “aims to nullify many of the ad targeting and tracking techniques now commonplace in online advertising,” it writes. “Brave … speeds page loading times by stripping away ads and blocking tracking devices.”

"Enterprise marketers – especially those that value local media highly – rate programmatic ad buying across digital and traditional media as one of their top three local marketing technology interests. As demand may outpace supply right now, local media publishers and marketing tech suppliers should view that as a chance to get their offerings in gear, rather than avoid the fray in fear of commoditized inventory," according to data from Street Fight's National-to-Local report.