A Wall Street Journal report argues that the $85 billion tie-up between AT&T and Time Warner is more about defense than offense. "The strongest case for the gargantuan merger that it is a hedge against a future where the first point of entry for a media consumer might be Netflix, Facebook, YouTube, or Hulu, just as easily as a cable or telecom company. to new opportunities to do household-level targeting with ads, making them more valuable and supporting content costs," the report said. It's also a cross-device targeting play in the sense that both players have massive …

Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) has formed a formal partnership with federal law enforcement agencies to combat criminal activity, TAG President and CEO Mike Zaneis told Beet.TV. Since its founding, TAG members have been sharing intelligence about bad actors in the digital advertising space so that the group can set anti-fraud standards.“We’re working with the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and Department of Justice,” Zaneis told Beet.TV in an interview during a break at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers last week. After TAG collects information about fraudulent activity and shares it with the advertising …

RadiumOne is launching a new programmatic creative unit that aims to improve the creative quality of programmatic ads and decrease consumers' growing rejection of online advertising, according to a report in Mediatel Newsline. RadiumOne'Creative Solutions "will produce and manage creative to be served programmatically and will cover all display formats, including video, mobile and native. It will also experiment with new ad formats," according to the report. "There's been a lot of crowing around programmatic creative but the reality is there's too much of a gap between people," said Emma Hazlehurst, who will lead the division. '"Making the end user …

Verizon's $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo may be on the line due to revelations about a major data breach in 2014, and Verizon wants to renegotiate the terms of the deal. But  remarkably, traffic on Yahoo rose slightly after the September 22 disclosure about the breach, according to a New York Times report. In 2014, nearly 500 million Yahoo accounts were hacked, and Verizon alleges the breach "could have been severe enough to set off a provision in the sale agreement that would allow Verizon to reopen the deal," according to the report. Yahoo reported Q3 results that exceeded Wall …

Ad tech firm Matomy Media Group said it has tapped RBC Capital Markets as its financial advisor to lead a review of strategic alternatives. The company said the goal is to assess all possibilities to increase shareholder value. “Notwithstanding the recent progress against strategic milestones and the company's financial strength, the board determined it was appropriate at this juncture to evaluate all opportunities to maximise value for shareholders,” the company said in a statement to DigitalLook.

Grey is looking to lean more heavily on programmatic and marketing technology to make its media buys more efficient, according to a report in The Drum. "We see a big opportunity in the fact that 75% of all display is currently bought programmatically, yet only 3% of it is served dynamically, and our pioneering platform can get new advertising in market at lightning speed. In heavily competitive markets, this can be the difference between exceeding your sales number or losing your shirt," Wayne Brown, Grey’s chief operations officer, told The Drum. Grey wants to use data and automated technology to …

According to an eMarketer report, last year the Association of Online Publishers in the UK reported that 35% of publishers said ad fraud was a serious hindrance to their business models. Ad blocking was the only activity that was thought of as a bigger problem. New data from Integral Ad Science (IAS) found that ad fraud is now less common in the UK. Only 3.2% of online display ad impressions analyzed on IAS’ platform were considered fraudulent. Three previous studies had that number at 5%, 7.8% and 9.1%, with the last one back in Q3 2015. The …

Getting multi-device attribution hasn't gotten any easier for marketers, according to a March 2016 Econsultancy study cited by eMarketer.  “[M]atching customers across multiple devices” was mentioned as a digital priority by nearly three-quarters of the marketers polled. Yet only 14% of marketers in the same survey said their company had the capability to handle such matching, a gap of 60 percentage points."

Mike Shields calls out the key questions behind  Facebook's "video inflate-gate," noting that while Facebook explained it works with third-party tracking firms, those firms don't track video duration, the metric that the social giant miscalculated. Bottom line: "All these measurement issues make it harder for an ad buyer to allocate budgets. A few years ago, an ad buyer may have been simply looking for enough data points to show that a digital platform -- say, Facebook -- should be part of a media plan. Now, the question is how much share of spending each of those platforms should be taking, …

Sixty percent of U.S. digital ad spending is "expected to be transacted through programmatic channels this year," according to a new eMarketer report. That's a big jump from the 2015 stat of 39% in 2015. Still, "video's share of share of total US programmatic digital display ad dollars is somewhat smaller (24.5%). This can be largely attributed to the limited supply of video ad inventory."