Unruly said it will use IBM Watson to create a new cognitive powered psychographic targeting tool to increase the effectiveness of digital video ads, according to Unruly. Unruly DNA combines the company’s emotional intelligence tools with IBM Watson’s machine learning capabilities to help identify and engage the people most likely to increase a brand’s sales. Unruly is tapping Watson’s Personality Insights service from the Cloud to help advertisers to learn how and why people think, act, and feel a certain way. The Unruly DNA tool analyzes social media and other digital data from consumers and learns personality traits such as …

Half of U.S. marketers polled by PR firm Walker  Sands Communications and the blog Chief Marketing Technologist reported that they will up their martech spend in 2017. One in five of those polled said they expect to increase their spend "greatly," according to an eMarketer article reporting on the poll of 335 U.S. marketers. The study found that the majority of marketers commit less than 25% of their budget to martech tools, while about one-third said they allocate between 1% and 10% and 36% said they earmark between 11% and 25%, according to the digital research firm's article.

Clear Channel Outdoor Americas is set to begin selling digital billboard ads programmatically, the Wall Street Journal reported. Clear Channel has tapped Rubicon Project as a partner and "plans to use the system to sell ad space on 1,000 of the digital billboard screens it owns across the U.S., including those located in some major airports," according to the report.  Clear Channel says the new programmatic offering will streamline the ad sales process, and will also help marketers better target ads to specific audiences. The company already offers clients audience research through Radar, a tool the company says "can help …

Connected TV viewing overall jumped 65% over the past year and now accounts for 8.1% of total TV viewing for adults between age 18 and 49 in the U.S. on a daily basis, according to Pivotal Research as reported by the Wall Street Journal. A big portion of that viewing is driven by Netflix and Amazon Prime, which are ad-free. However, ad-tech company "Innovid, which delivers ads to web video outlets as well as a growing number of TV apps such as Fox Now, Hulu and Crackle, says the share of ads delivered through its platform to connected TVs quadrupled …

Adroll has laid off around 29 employees, according to a Dec. 7 report in Fortune. The ad-tech firm, which has nearly 500 employees and has raised some $90 million in funding, attributed the cuts to a shifting of priorities. CEO Aaron Bell told Fortune that there was no personnel impact on R&D, adding: "We saw record-breaking revenue in 2016 and these changes will support our ambitious growth plans for 2017 and beyond."

The Wall Street Journal offers up its take on Amazon's push into ad tech, a move into header bidding, among other things, that Ad Age broke last week. First, it notes that Amazon's Publisher Services group is rolling out a header bidding product that's "designed to help web publishers enable multiple ad buyers, including ad networks and ad agencies, to bid on ad space simultaneously." The goal, of course, is to help publishers get more control over their ad inventory and derive more revenue from it. The nuance is  that Amazon's version of header bidding is cloud-based and reportedly transparent, …

Fake news headlines fool U.S. adults about 75% of the time, according to a new survey conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs for BuzzFeed News. In addition, the survey found that people who cite Facebook as a major source of news are more likely to view fake news headlines as accurate than those who rely less on the platform for news. The new data comes from an online survey of 3,015 U.S. adults conducted between Nov. 28 and Dec. 1.

The Guardian reports that Facebook is testing a tool designed to help it "identify and hide so-called 'fake news' on the social network, in an attempt to quell increasingly vocal criticism of its role in spreading untruths and propaganda." The tool asks readers to rank on a scale of one to five the extent to which they think a link’s title "uses misleading language." The articles the readers were asked to rank were from Rolling Stone magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chortle, a news site which reports on comedy. The Guardian report says it's not clear how Facebook plans to …

AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong told an audience at Business Insider's Ignition Conference that he’s 'cautiously optimistic' that Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo will go through despite the internet company’s disclosure this fall that it suffered a significant data breach," according to a Wall Street Journal report. Armstrong conceded that the data breach has slowed Verizon/AOL's plans to acquire Yahoo. Armstrong predicted "that over the next few years, as more companies in digital media grapple with Google and Facebook's  advertising dominance, there will be more consolidation driven by a desire to build larger audience scale," he told the Journal. He said …

Magna, GroupM, and ZenithOptimedia revealed forecasts that show increases in global ad spending in 2017, according to an article in eMarketer. Magna said it expects global ad spending to increase 5.7%, while GroupM and Zenith estimated increases at 4.4%. Ad revenues from mobile will post a 54.2% increase this year, according to Magna, but fall to 34.5% in 2017. Magna, GroupM and ZenithOptimedia all projected relatively healthy increases in global ad spending in 2017, despite the challenges in following a year that included the Summer Olympics and a US election. - See …