Not too long ago, Will Doherty speculated what digital advertising will be like once cookies are past their peak.There's no doubt that cookie pools are shrinking, driven (per Doherty) by the consumer's move to mobile. To market at scale, he envisions tracking mechanisms in all mobile -- and eventually all household -- devices. In other words, the alternatives will function pretty much like today's cookies. With all due respect, device type tells just a part of the story of the shrinking cookie pool. The ad industry likes to say that our top priority is listening to the consumer. If that's …

The most potent opportunity of digital marketing is the ability to access and leverage data about nearly everything. Data-driven or "programmatic" marketing isn't just about RTB, exchanges, DSPs, or trading desks - those are means, not results. It's about the ability for marketers to understand and make intelligent decisions about where their messages are being placed, to whom they're being targeted, and with what specific outcomes. This is an incredible economic opportunity for both marketers and publishers if the two sides come together and get it right.

The auto industry is usually a first in everything digital - and programmatic is not an exception. The auto digerati are innovators and early market leaders who are always the first to jump into new formats and strategies. You do not visit Detroit just for the hockey, to see Ann Arbor or to get a beer with Kid Rock. The auto industry's investment in dollars is time well spent in digital advertising. They really scale programmatic direct deals (auto up-fronts), programmatic private exchanges and real-time bidding for performance, as well as branding.

Just when you thought there was no more room in investment bank Luma Partners' Lumascape, with the advent of so many new programmatic business models it may be time to consider a new way to think about and characterize the current box/category labeled "agency trade desks (ATDs)." ATDs are in fact media traders, who by business design may or may not be acting purely on behalf of clients. It is becoming clear that media traders are one of two breeds:

The themes echoed in Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" are alive and well in New York and San Francisco today. The major concepts of duality, revolution and resurrection are perfect to describe the rise of programmatic advertising. We are seeing our own stories of the terror and overthrows, as big changes are happening or lie ahead for the advertising technology industry with the arrival of programmatic direct and premium programmatic.

There are many ins and outs of buying media over RTB, which can be confusing for brands that are just beginning to enter the marketplace. The variables in pricing, management systems and types of campaign deliveries can be daunting. Here's what we've learned along the road to successfully delivered ad impressions:

Mobile advertisers have it all wrong. They think real-time bidding (RTB) is all that's used for performance advertising. And they think big-name publishers (the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Facebook) are what they're relying on for premium ad distribution. Not only can you (and should you) use direct publishers & RTB extension for both -- but guess what? Your campaigns are already being run this way. It's a dirty, yet well-known secret within the ad tech industry, but not so much outside of it (or to its customers), that performance and premium are often used in tandem without useful …

For once, online advertising has the opportunity to beat television ads. The content that's running in the ad unit natively will allow the window to premium programmatic to blow right open.

If you pay attention to the news (or the gas pumps) you're aware of the concept of "peak oil," which posits that oil production will hit a high point after which the number of barrels produced declines in every subsequent year. There's a strong parallel in online media, where the rise in mobile content consumption is making the cookie less important. While there are detractors to the concept of "peak oil," it's impossible to deny that we're very close to hitting "peak cookie," leaving marketers with less access to cookie-level data in the following years.

A lot can happen in six hours: You can fly from one coast to the other or run a marathon. You can even play in a Super Bowl or two! Mainstream DSPs can take six hours or more to report the media buys that were made on your behalf. Digital media vendors boast about the latest and greatest in real-time bidding, yet they are willing to label something that takes almost an entire workday "real time." That's as if a head football coach prepared a playbook, handed it off to his quarterback, got on a plane to London and then …