Earlier this month, Charles Butler, the new CTO of Annalect -- Omnicom's analytics and marketing technology division -- spoke about the company's intent to consolidate various data management technologies and applications under one platform. The increasing investment across media conglomerates in proprietary technologies as well as mutually beneficial tech partnerships is commendable. In fact, it is becoming a trend: Xasis also recently proclaimed it has invested $25 million in a data management platform. Such efforts allow agencies to reclaim control over the data generated by paid and organic media, bolstering their ability to understand the full circle of communication between …

While the programmatic space holds great promise, marketers have navigated it with varying degrees of commitment and success. A main reason many brands have been slow to embrace programmatic media, or have not found success as yet, is that they are unsure how to properly identify marketplace partners that can steward them through the nuances necessary to fully realize the benefits of this new paradigm. It is complicated to be sure, but there are steps a marketer can take to simplify the selection process.

Time-based metrics are getting everyone's attention at the moment because buying proxies of time are much better than buying clicks. Brands are fighting for a slice of a consumer's life, and time is the best measurement to understand if advertisers' efforts are successful. Moving marketers away from click-throughs and impressions to time-spent metrics is a movement in the right direction. Many believe the catalyst will be the combination of attention metrics and programmatic. This seems to work even if pricing goes up somewhat for brands.

The core of programmatic marketing is buying the right impression at the right time at the right price. These days, many advertisers try to find a partner that knows how to buy the right impression by giving multiple parties a chance to bid on the same cookie pool at the same time. This has several negative side effects. Higher costs for the advertiser, lack of control, poor optimization, wrong interpretation of the numbers and conversion attribution are some of the major problems that occur in such a case.

A few weeks ago, RTB Insider ran a post on a topic referred to as the programmatic industry's "obesity problem." The column pointed to five ways that ad-tech companies are jeopardizing the health of the industry. The gist of the article: More is not always better. But here's the way I see it: The availability of more data and more inventory is a positive indicator of an industry on the rise.

The lines have blurred when it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as consumers now engage in both online and offline shopping activity all weekend long. What tends to happen during a high volume-shopping period is that the number of advertisers bidding on audiences increases signficantly, which drives up the bid price. As bid prices go up, so does the cost per acquisition, making it much more costly to acquire a customer. Inventory can also be harder to come by. As RTB matures, companies will become better equipped to deal with the holiday rush. Here are some things you …

The programmatic trading landscape is evolving fast. As a result, there are considerable differences in the way the U.S. and European markets are developing. Real-time bidding (RTB) first emerged in the U.S. as the initial phase of programmatic. Europe did not simply imitate the U.S., but also adapted to meet the needs of countries, partners, agencies, and brands. Similar to when the Americans led the Ryder Cup before the 1980s, the British added in European players and now dominate the U.S. in this golf grudge match. The "Ryder Cup Trend" may be the case in premium programmatic due to the …

The RTB ecosystem, with its fundamental need for measurement and attribution, could be holding marketers back from fully realizing the potential of their overall media plans. By continually reinforcing the notion that spend should be focused on channels that have the most measurable or attributable performance in the context of the consumer purchase path, brands risk fundamentally misaligning their spend with their goals.

Experts in programmatic believe in-house buying by brands plus value-added services from agencies are both needed to realize the huge potential of programmatic. There are five reasons why it's a good idea for brands to handle their programmatic efforts both in-house and with agencies. Let's start from the top.

I've spent a long time buying and selling media on behalf of major brands, on both the account management and media vendor sides, and today I'm seeing marketers more and more overwhelmed by all their options. The advent and rapidly growing adoption of programmatic (where I've worked for the last four years) has added even more confusion. But there's hope. I've watched many a weary client and agency partner's face light up when I say the following: "Marketing 101 still applies. Programmatic is just another tool, and it has a time and a place."