The advertising industry hasn't quite managed to target TV ads per households through set-top box and Web data as execs from NXP (Philips) Semiconductors envisioned 10 years ago, but Nielsen has built a platform relying on audience segments that combines TV viewing habits and online behavior.

The new Obama app is a great example of how putting data into people's hands can embolden, empower and even surprise them. You know the kitchen table political arguments you keep losing because you don't have any facts and figures in front of you? This app seems to know that sympathizers for a cause need ammo.

Some 62% of adults say they're afraid of missing news or an important event if they don't keep an eye on their social network pages, according to the 2012 "Connecting and Communicating Online: State of Social Media" study.

At the OMMA Display shows this week, I noted a general realization that even in their display advertising, people wanted more content than pitches.

How does the ad industry get to "scarcity"? At the OMMA Premium Display conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Mike Rich, VP of media at comScore, said the ad industry sits at the crossroads of a "big transformation" in the way online media gets bought and sold. The industry needs to reduce the amount of inventory on publisher sites,

According to a new survey of marketers by eConsultancy, more companies are still talking the talk about personalization than are walking the walk.

BlueKai on Wednesday officially launched the Data Activation System, a platform combining the company's Data Exchange amd Data Management Platform with its media insights tool, Audience across Media (AxM), now officially out of beta. The company will create a third-party app network to support the platform.

The mobile wallet is an idea that has been more appealing to the mobile infrastructure than to the merchants and consumers it purports to serve. Placecast wants to solve that problem with geo-targeted and geo-fenced offers that give the model real value for both constituencies.

Yahoo bought interclick last November for $270 million, and this week the company began rolling out Genome, an audience buying platform built on the acquisition's ad targeting technology. It will let the Sunnyvale, Calif., company finally capitalize on all that audience data collected from search queries, accounts and clicks across its network of sites.

How will ad agencies and their clients protect data when cars can pass information from one vehicle to another through Wi-Fi connections? Ford Motor Co. began installing on-board computers in work trucks in mid-2000, and Wi-Fi transmitters in passenger cars since 2010. Now researchers at several universities have discovered how to make one in several cars the conduit to upload information.