Writing in Fast Company, Joe Lazauskas, editor-in-chief of Contently, says native advertising is broken -- that study findings reveal 54% of consumers have felt deceived by native advertising. The study, of 1,212 adults who regularly access the Internet, was conducted by Contently and the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York, and found:  --The majority (77%) of those polled didn't interpret native ads as advertising. --Almost half (44%) weren't able to correctly identify the sponsor of the native ad they read. --And about the same percentage (43%) lose trust in a publisher when it features …

A KPMG survey of CEOs In China found that 57% of those polled said they use data and analytics in the marketing process and to achieve cost efficiencies, according to an article by eMarketer, a digital research firm. Nearly as many use data and analytics to develop new products and services. Nearly half of those polled "use data and analytics to predict or manage skills shortages and four in 10 respondents said they use it to improve financial reporting," according to the eMarketer article.

A report in PerformanceIN carries a rundown of all the big deals in video in 2016. The report says "Parisian startup StickyADs.TV was one of the last of the private firms to go this year, bought by Comcast subsidiary FreeWheel, a video management solutions provider for some of the world’s largest media and entertainment companies."  And then there was TubeMogul which "capped off a ten-year run with a $450 million acquisition by Adobe in November, equipping the acquiring firm’s Marketing Cloud with a Demand-Side-Platform (DSP) capable of buying inventory across desktop, streaming devices and TVs." Andy Morley, U.K. managing director of …

The Business Insider reports that Rubicon Project has seen two more high-profile defections after disappointing Q3 earnings and the loss of its CTO. Jay Sears Rubicon's SVP of marketplace development has joined Mastercard Advisors as head of its media solutions group, and Adam Chandler, senior vice president of global technology partnerships, departed to join Kargo, the mobile brand advertising startup. The departures, BI reports, come just a month after it was announced that Rubicon's CTO Neal Richter, would be shifting to an advisory role. Richter was replaced by Tom Kershaw, who joined Rubicon in October. In November, Rubicon laid off 125 …

When we talk about programmatic media and advertising, it's usually a discussion of ad buying and targeting, but what about the creative process and the process of making ads? A Wall Street Journal report focuses on ad tech companies such as Eyeview and Spongecell which raised $21.5 million and $10.5 million, respectively, "promising to bring more of the automated aspects of digital advertising to the typically art-dominated creative side of the business." The Journal also cited a report in Recode that noted Snapchat's acquisition of Flite, an ad tech firm that focuses on programmatic creative. Is there a trend here?

Writing for Econsultancy, a trio of "experts," Chris O'Hara, Head of Global Marketing, Krux (Salesforce DMP); Emily Macdonald, Head of Programmatic, International, DigitasLBi; and Tom Wright, Head of Programmatic, Tomorrow TTH, gazed into their crystal balls to come up with some predictions. O'Hara sees the "democratization" of data science coming in 2017: "We will start to see the evolution of data science applications as they become more embedded in platforms—'AI layers' that leverage machine learning within platforms, and make things like user scoring, propensity modeling, lifetime value (LTA) analysis, and next-best action recommendations less manual and more automated." McDonald sees …

Just a day after purchasing media metadata business Gracenote for $560 million, Nielsen confirmed that it acquired audience data business VisualDNA, according to a report in The Drum. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. "VisualDNA is an audience data business that supplies data to brands, agencies and publishers. The data is based off the results of a psychographic personality test that’s been taken by over 40 million people," according to the report. The acquisition, for Nielsen, joins two of the U.K.'s leading data providers and the VusualDNA analytics tool, consumer survey capabilities, and data footprint are expected …

White Ops, an ad-fraud-detection firm, alleges that a Russian hacking operation has been defrauding online advertisers in the U.S. of more than $3 million a day. White Ops released a research report on Tuesday in which it said it found an online ad-fraud operation it calls “Methbot.” Ad fraud, which manifests in non-human traffic and bots that "view" advertising, is estimated to be a $7.2 billion problem in the ad industry. “We’ve never seen anything like this. Methbot elevates ad fraud to a whole new level of sophistication and scale,” said Michael Tiffany, co-founder and CEO of White Ops, told …

The Drum speaks to Paul Sternhell, general manager of programmatic direct and ad server for OpenX, about the rise of programmatic direct and where it fits into the programmatic ecoystem. He says advertisers are looking for "certainty, priority, and choice" with their programmatic buys, and that programmatic direct is "the buying and selling of advertising through workflow automation by buyers and sellers who are known to each other."  The benefits? "It gives publishers efficient and automated execution of direct sales, and for buyers it enables the efficient discovery of inventory and the automation of execution for direct purchases. As a …

Skyhook, an ndependent location platform, said it joined the AppNexus marketplace as a mobile location insights data provider. The integration of Skyhook’s Personas aims to  help increase the value of publishers’ advertising inventory by ensuring accurate location-based behavioral targeting, insights, and attribution.