Ray Pettit, Ph.D., is the chief analytics officer for ITVX at Rentrak, which means he is deeply immersed in the measurement of branded and in-program content. In my interview with him, Pettit talks about ITVX, biometrics in measurement, cross-platform applications to ITVX, native advertising measurements -- and, because he began his career as a musician, the importance of a liberal arts education in professional growth.

Ultimately, Google's goal with the Panda update is to ensure that consumers are pointed to the highest quality Web pages possible. But for all its good intentions, there have been some clear winners and losers, whose websites either gained or lost visibility in Google's organic search results.

Now that advertising is driven by "big data," marketers are well aware that certain targeting segments can make a positive impact on their campaigns. In ad tech, anyone with an algorithm and a data scientist on their staff can make a few bucks by pulling together some appealing segments and selling them to marketers. However, not all data segments are created equal. If online marketers and data companies keep trying to plug in the same segments, campaign after campaign, they will see diminishing returns. Targeting the same mom or auto intender segments doesn't do much good. Marketers need some outside-the-box …

We've reached another milestone in revolutionizing the measurement of digital ads. On June 30, the Media Rating Council's (MRC) gating period for transacting on accredited measures of video viewability ended, ushering in an era of new transactional currency. The new era may be underway, but it is still early enough that some are still in need of the basics.

Marketers today are swimming in data: customer data, loyalty data, first-party and third-party data, social media data, etc. All this data is great for learning more about customers and their preferences, but how do you use it to improve campaign effectiveness? The following are seven key considerations -- a checklist of best practices, if you will -- to help marketers use their data to improve the performance of their media buys.