Simulmedia said it entered into a deal to use data about consumer behavior from the Oracle Data Cloud with the goal of creating "more effective and efficient ad campaigns for marketers," Broadcasting & Cable reported. Oracle positioned the deal as an initial foray into the TV space. "The move shows that planning and buying advertising campaigns based on data is becoming more accepted in the TV business. NBCUniversal says it plans to sell $1 billion worth of its ad inventory based on data. And Turner, Viacom and Fox have formed the OpenAP consortium designed to standardize data-based audience buying and …

Snap plans to launch a location-based ad targeting product. The fledgling public company said marketers will be able to use Snap to Store to measure whether their ad campaigns on the Snapchat app actually send consumers to specific locations, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Snap has been testing the product since last year with a few marketers but it plans to launch the product more widely with marketers in the retail, quick service restaurant, movie, and auto categories. It also plans to offer marketers running ad campaigns on Snapchat data that will show how their campaigns …

Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard has actively been calling out the digital advertising industry since January, so why not sound off to The New York Times about the issues? Pritchard tells the Times it's time the industry grew up. And if the world's biggest advertiser can't tell off the industry, who can? Pritchard is taking the industry to task on several fronts: He's demanding more transparency from giants like Google and Facebook, as well as ad-tech firms and media agencies on measurement, "how many people see them and with what kind of content they are appearing," the …

News Corp. named Jesse Angelo chief of digital advertising solutions, The Drum reports. Angelo adds the new duties to his current role of chief executive officer and publisher of The New York Post, a News Corp. newspaper. The move comes before News Corp.'s highly anticipated programmatic advertising offering expected later this year. Angelo is tasked with managing the platform’s development and launch and courting advertisers. The Drum reports that the company's Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch; Barron’s, Mansion Global, and The New York Post are expected to figure prominently in the upcoming programmatic launch. "News Corp is …

"Digital ads are easy to hate," writes Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times. Most everyone can agree on that. And now, with more advertisers finding that YouTube's search engine was placing their ads placed on sites with offensive content, there's a renewed focus on the poor quality of the online ad supply and the programmatic media buying practices that are contributing to the problem. Manjoo recommends pausing a beat before condemning programmatic ads. "On the one hand, there are some clear problems with how programmatic ads are placed. The industry is rife with complexity. This …

Search advertising vet Danny Sullivan takes a deeper dive into Google's ongoing brand safety crisis. "In the end, it’s good that Google is going through this search quality crisis. This new pressure is forcing it to attend to issues that can no longer be allowed to fester," he reports in Search Engine Land. Sullivan offers a mini history of Google's search crises and shows how this latest challenge relates. "It’s not clear, however, if Google will be able to solve its biggest issue overall: the drip-drip-drip of criticism for problems that no search engine can ever fully eliminate, given how broad search is. …

ActionIQ just raised $13 million from Sequoia Capital and other investors. Simply put, the startup “wants to help marketing employees navigate big data without having to write code,” said Venture Beat. “The startup provides software as a service (SaaS) to connect a business’ multiple data sources, such as email, CRM, and clickstream, and centralize them onto one single analytics dashboard.”

Agency holding company Dentsu has acquired digital marketing firm Leapfrog Online. The financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but Leapfrog achieved $30 million to $40 million in revenue in 2016, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Leapfrog will be absorbed into performance marketing shop iProspect, which is part of the holding company’s network outside of Japan. The report said that Leapfrog offers iProspect access to clients that it doesn't have, enabling it to tailor ads based on what it knows about consumers' searches and browsing.

Many marketers want better standards for digital advertising performance and more testing vs. a debate over metrics, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. These marketers want to see more tests to see what works on platforms like Facebook and Snapchat so they can better take advantage of them. 

Google's YouTube ad problem -- that marketers found  some of their ads have appeared next to video content that' s promoting hate -- is actually very small, and it's already taken steps to address the issue, the company claims. In an interview with Recode, Google's chief business officer Philipp Schindler said the company has improved its response time from the time when a person identifies an offensive video and is working to improve its user interface for advertisers. In addition, Schindler said that software improvements are enabling Google to identify five times more videos that it seeks to keep from …