First-of-its-kind programmatic marketplace data released by Guideline this morning shows just how stratified the U.S. ad market now is, with "traditional" media declining 5% and "premium" programmatic expanding 47% so far this year.

Finding value in low consumer satisfaction is not how marketers think. But it is how economists think.

CMOs often lament they need twice that, at least, to stand apart in hyper-speed digital media. The fact is, $5 million is a normal budget for the mid-market brands and a dream for many startups. The problem is when marketers make it work more like $2 million. They need to double their impact, not there budget.

Maybe they're not garbage in/garbage out, but to coin yet another new industry acronym, maybe they are MIIMIO: misaligned incentives in/misaligned incentives out.

That's what an ARF town hall discussed Wednesday following its release of a "top 100" premium suppliers list, which ranks Hulu No. 1 and France's Le Figaro No. 100.

It used to be that if you guessed a young woman was liberal, you'd be wrong seven out of ten times. Today, it's six of ten. Better, but still off-target.

As editor of trade pubs focused on where advertisers and agencies plan and buy media, I've struggled for years to understand why gaming isn't more of the mix. That's about to change.

While first-party data ranks as the No. tactic being used by ad execs to target consumers in response to restrictive privacy laws, contextual data is a close No. 2, according to findings of an ad industry survey released this morning by Proximic by Comscore.

With more than 4 in 5 ad dollars going to digital, China has the greatest share of digital of any developed nation -- and significantly higher than the No. 2 digital market -- the United States.

The future of a streamlined ad-tech industry won't be shaped by cookies -- it will come from addressing the day-to-day tasks that form the bedrock of successful campaigns.