Last month, a spotlight presentation at the iMedia Brand Summit highlighted a programmatic success story, which got me thinking about the future of online publishers. New measurement techniques and technologies have emerged that are changing the way the online display advertising and search markets work for both advertisers and publishers. Let's take a closer look at this changing playing field and what it means for publishers.

Digital advertising currency is on the threshold of a major transformation. The first big ecosystem-wide milestone for the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative is almost upon us: the Media Rating Council (MRC) will soon be lifting its advisory to green-light viewable impressions as the currency for brand advertising transactions. The expected date is March 31.

I recently attended the IAB Annual Leadership Conference, where one of the main topics was media fraud, a subject of long-time interest for me that's been receiving renewed attention of late. Two things dismayed me: to hear that no one actually knows the size, or the sources, of the problem; and to see technology vendors pitching a "solution" to the problem. Nobody wants to admit where the problem is, nor how large it is, so maybe this is the dirty little secret where most everybody is making money.

There has always been this wide chasm between what clients think is possible and what their agency counterparts think in terms of measurement of digital advertising. Or, as I like to call it, the accountability gap. But recently, fueled by some aggressive claims by third-party tech purveyors, marketers are increasingly demanding that offline sales be causally linked to their media plans. Not to be the voice of pessimism, but I'd like to take this opportunity to emphatically remind marketers that despite what vendors say, there are no magic bullets in the marketplace that would firmly link ads to offline sales!

While most marketers are familiar with the concept of online advertising fraud, the conversation spiked recently with an article in The Atlantic, "Welcome to the Internet of Thingies: 61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human." The piece details how, for the first time, bot traffic has eclipsed human traffic, accounting for 61.5% of all website visitors. While this fraudulent traffic may be considered a mere nuisance to most marketers, what they might not realize is how much it's actually costing them. According to a recent article, the cost is estimated to be on the order of $6 billion annually.

When the ANA, the 4A's and the IAB came together to create the Making Measurement Make Sense initiative (3MS), we knew we would accelerate marketers' ability to use digital media to build brands along with legacy media. We knew that digital measurement needed to work in a cross-platform world. In addition, 3MS has to give brands the tools for the right allocations of media for an individual brand at a particular moment in its evolution.

The news, announced this week, of Google and comScore parnering on metrics with validated Campaign Essentials is a major step forward for digital advertising. Making it easy for advertisers to evaluate digital advertising investment against a metric that CMOs have been using for decades (the Gross Rating Point, or GRP) represents a major evolution for Google, as it's one of the first, and easily most significant, instances of the digital giant embracing non-Google means of measurement.

While the digital advertising industry has been on an onward trajectory, and spending is at a high, upwards of 20% to 30% of all online ads are affected by suspicious activity by cybercriminals.

The precision with which multichannel marketing performance can now be measured is unprecedented. As CEOs and CFOs continue to demand improved ROI accountability from marketers, adopting more advanced measurement techniques will become vital to optimize spending in 2014. Here are some compelling reasons why:

Digital media has been at the forefront of consumers' lives for some time now. We in marketing and media struggle with the challenges of measuring users, and how much and when digital media is being consumed, in order to measure the full media diet. Rarely do we collectively explore what content brands mean in today's constantly changing media landscape. We have not yet mapped the site content "brandscape," nor have we mined its value to advertisers. The IAB explored the contours of the consumer experience with content on sites belonging to media brands that originated in the analog world, as …