Big data continues to garner attention, and third-party data vendors in particular have enjoyed celebrity success these past few years due to advances with third-party cookies. But the increasing mobile consumption across multiple devices, most of which do not utilize cookies, combined with a renewed interest in privacy, are bringing a multitude of challenges to third-party providers. To avert the increasing challenges of working with these vendors, digital marketers are activating first-party data and finding opportunity to engage consumers in more transparent, meaningful ways.

WPP had three wins in the first half of the year. The first win was the merger of 24/7 Real Media and Xaxis, which gave WPP the largest trading desk in the world, with more engineers, platforms and direct publisher relationships than anyone else. WPP's second win was the failed merger between Publicis and Omnicom, ensuring that WPP is still the largest agency holding group. The third big win may not be as well known, but it may be the most important: the creation of Mindshare's The Loop.

The recent article "The Coming Subprime Advertising Crisis" points out flaws within the advertising industry as it evolves. While there are core elements of the advertising ecosystem that need to be addressed to ensure that we deliver value in the ecosystem, we cannot blame programmatic media or data-driven targeting. On the contrary, programmatic media and data-driven targeting are part of the solution, and key parts of a well-oiled advertising algorithm. They are NOT the problem.

The online ad industry has been battling issues of transparency for most of its existence and adoption of programmatic media sales has only fueled the debate. Fewer than one quarter of client-side marketers understand programmatic and use it in campaigns, while 42% feel that concerns over transparency have increased in the past year, according to a recent survey by the ANA and Forrester. Advertisers have a right to be concerned, as less of their budget is going toward ads that are actually shown to the target audience, in a suitable environment and the right number of times.

In the 20-year-old-plus search and display digital media industry today, video has raised all boats. Yet mobile promises the most disruption, new customer experiences and deeper engagement. And in mobile's rise to the top, innovation will fall to the "digital dogs" to lead the advertising industry television "fat cats" in dollars, mindshare and attention.

A recent trend has prompted me to preemptively say I was wrong about something. I have been claiming that while most of the industry buzz the past 18 months has been about sales channel conflict with publishers, the larger drama is among the agency trading desks set up by the major holding companies -- some partly to take advantage of client fee "double dipping" as well as to leverage specific skill sets and platforms that provide a very different operational process and client benefit for programmatic buying vs. traditional IO-based buying.

Big data's potential for programmatic advertising, if utilized in milliseconds, will allow brand advertisers to act in the moment (real-time): a place where consumers are more likely to view advertising as content marketing. The aim of marketing, after all, is to make advertising (selling) superfluous. This goal is to avoid one-way interruptions, but there is now a way to deliver useful content at precisely the moment a buyer needs it.

We've all seen it: the rampant self-identification and re-identification that goes on in the programmatic marketplace. A company is a DSP, SSP or DMP one day, and a combination of a couple, or all, ad tech categories the next. There's a desire to be all things to all buyers -- but therein lies the risk that we lose identity and opportunity in the process.

Two hundred milliseconds. Two hundred thousandths of a second. The equivalent of a slow snap of your fingers. Less than the length of a 16th note played on a piano. Digital ads are bid, bought, sold, delivered and seen in this exceptionally brief time span. The real-time trafficking process for ad units sold programmatically is incredibly complex, yet it takes place in the blink of an eye.

Programmatic advertising involves a lot of advanced technology and artificial intelligence. To place a display ad in front of the exact right user at the exact right moment requires predictive modeling, adaptive control, portfolio optimization, and a long list of other technical components. It's no wonder, then, that we're always talking about the brilliant technology and artificial intelligence at work in programmatic campaigns. But while all the attention to the technology may be justified, it's also important to focus on the role of people in creating and adjusting the models.