At the recent OMMA Audience Targeting conference, I moderated a panel on using data and analytics to more effectively reach audiences on TV. It was clear from our discussion that advertisers, programmers and MVPDs have gotten more sophisticated about targeting ads for TV viewers -- and opportunities exist to even more effectively reach consumers and stimulate purchases.

Even though data management is a huge challenge for most advertisers and publishers, the industry is getting a handle on the must-have set of tools for DMPs and DSPs. The tough part of the big data is to prescribe solutions for brands and source different pieces of data from the web from paid, owned, and earned media. There is now a "lucky seven" of data doctors who started working in third-party data and direct response and have now moved to first-party data and branding. They have done a great job as data partners and are helping to move digital advertising …

Programmatic buying has broken through. It's more mainstream and more effective than ever, but now buyers want to know: What is this "programmatic private" thing I hear about? Does it work? And if you're already buying on the open programmatic markets, is it worth the effort?

Programmatic platforms are continuing to gain momentum as an efficient way to buy and sell advertising. Still, there's been considerable debate about whether truly premium inventory is being made available in these new automated systems. By all accounts, most publishers have not committed to making their most valuable, premium inventory available to advertisers in a programmatic environment.

The Digital Big Five (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL) have strategically built, bought, and partnered to ensure they lead in direct digital sales as well as programmatic.

In the fast-evolving ad tech world, new research on trends, emerging technologies and best practices surfaces every week. I'm taking a look at some of the latest research to break down key takeaways.

Everyone -- especially runners -- loves the New York City Marathon. The same passion can be felt by programmatic and data enthusiasts. Programmatic buyers and sellers are constantly sprinting for new inventory, the latest technology, reducing costs, fighting for more control, transparency, and measuring attribution. Data speed freaks are quickly aggregating DMPs and building cookie pools while wrestling with third-, second-, and first-party data. Similar to planning to run the NYC Marathon, brands and publishers need to determine goals, KPIs and business objectives. Brands that do not train (or in the case of programmatic and big data: do not test, …

Pricing programmatic inventory -- be it display, video, mobile, or social -- can be more complex than it might at first seem. There are plenty of cost models, from CPM, eCPM (electronic CPM), dCPM (dynamic CPM), and on and on, but all too often we fixate on these models without ever looking at the price relative to the campaign's performance.

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.