It's tempting to think RTB and programmatic are all about machines whizzing data around server clusters. The truth is that it takes highly skillful planners and creatives to ensure the technology is set up to reach not just your audience, but crucially, to also target niches within that group in different manners.

Those who are wondering how to learn more about their customers' use of mobile or how to apply online learnings to mobility might have a very simple solution. At a MediaPost Audience Targeting event in London on Monday experts agreed -- location is mobile's cookie.

Programmatic offers so much promise -- but transparency issues could prompt advertisers to just deal with tech companies direct or take their advertising in-house. Whither the agency?

The second Facebook begins talking about allowing users to be anonymous, you know there's a big problem. The masters of data collection and selling are effectively admitting they will lose market share if they continue stripping and selling information behind users' backs. A quiet revolution is beginning.

IAB reports always lead to huge figures that leap off the page. Behind these, however, there is a very clear trend. It's no longer enough to be on the side of pages hoping to get clicked. In the attention economy, advertisers need to get within the content itself to drive engagement.

If you want to get an idea of how undigital a digital organsiation can be, trying upgrading your subscription with "The Times." Honestly, give it a go, and then go back to your CIO and figure out how marketing can work better with IT to deliver something that isn't, quite frankly, laughably embarrassing.

Programmatic and RTB are so new that nobody can fully predict what impact they will have. Although research from AOL today reveals that one in two executives think it doesn't make the industry any less human, that still leaves half who may think it does. A fascinating conundrum as we prepared for MediaPost's London RTB event on October 14th.

The upcoming Twitter TV metrics from Kantar Media look to be exciting and useful. A word of caution, however -- the old chestnut of "impression" is mentioned. More than ever, with Twitter this metric needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. The rest all looks good. Enjoy the targeting -- ignore the impressions!

The scramble for Ello invites has been the talk of social media -- but does this new network have the right model to bring the fight to Facebook?

Spinning off PayPal makes a great deal of sense now that it has outgrown eBay and is less reliant on the site for transactions. When the move is formalised next year there will be frenzied rumours of takeovers. Google and Alibaba have already been mentioned. But what about a mobile brand -- Microsoft, perhaps?