Carat USA has tapped Mindshare vet Michael Epstein as Chief Strategy Officer, a new position reporting to Global President Doug Ray. He most recently was president of strategic resource and client services at WPP's Mindshare, responsible for all digital media services for North America, new business, multicultural and promotions, and key client relationships.

WPP and Twitter on Thursday announced a global strategic partnership that will expand collaboration between the two companies. The deal follows a wide-ranging alliance agreed to by Twitter and Publicis Groupe in April. Covering data and analytics, media investment and social media, the WPP agreement spans several holding company units - including GroupM, research arm Kantar, and digital agencies such as Wunderman. As part of the deal, which was led on the WPP side by its Data Alliance unit, WPP companies from a variety of disciplines will utilize Twitter data across a number of initiatives to deliver what the holding …

At Tech For Direct in New York this afternoon, Anthony Katsur, CEO, Maxifier, gave six reasons how programmatic premium differentiates itself from real-time bidding (RTB). First, Katsur said that premium offers better brand association, like being associated with big time publishers such as the New York Times. Second, he argued that there is more brand data available.

Speaking at Tech For Direct in New York City this afternoon, John Ramey, CEO of isocket, claimed that "the DeLorean is not evil," with the DeLorean being ad tech. Ramey believes that direct sales and tech sales should not exist in two separate worlds (right in line with the name of the event). "You have to have the right machines in the right place," he said.

YouTube’s ad sales from mobile devices has tripled in the last six months, adding as much as an estimated $350 million in revenue to the Google-owned video hub, according to a Bloomberg report. Nearly a quarter of YouTube’s 1 billion users worldwide access the service through handheld devices, driving up mobile ad spending, Lucas Watson, VP of sales, at YouTube, said. eMarketer projects U.S. mobile video ad revenue will grow 10-fold from last year to $2.69 billion by 2017.

Pandora on Wednesday announced a new browser-based version of its music service for the living room it touts as designed “from the ground up” for TV and the remote control. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are the initial devices to support tv.pandora.com, but the company plans to expand the new HTML5-based offering to compatible smart TVs and set-top boxes in the coming months. Already more than 10 million people access Pandora through connected TVs or set-top boxes. But that effort to date has required developing customized integrations for each different TV model or related device. To …

Nearly a quarter (23%) of external traffic to news sites comes from social networks, with Facebook driving 58% of social referrals. The finding comes from SimpleReach, which makes software powering sharing activing across a network of 5,000 sites ranging from personal blogs to large outlets like Forbes.com, People.com, and FoxSports.com. In a recent blog post, the company said Facebook’s share of social traffic was more than twice the share for Twitter (26%), with StumbleUpon a distant third, at 6.6%. Given that Facebook’s user base is four times that of Twitter (1.1 billion monthly active users versus 200 …

Smartphone shipments will outstrip those of feature phones for the first time this year, with the former accounting for 52.2% of all mobile phone shipments worldwide in 2013, according to a new forecast from IDC. The research firm projects smartphone shipments will grow 32.7% to 958.8 million units this year, with emerging markets accounting for nearly two thirds (64.8%) of that total. Driving smartphone sales has been a combination of factors including rising demand for mobile data, increased emphasis by carriers and manufacturers, and a wide selection of devices at varying price points. The average selling price …

Struggling social games maker Zynga on Monday said it plans to cut about 520 jobs, or 18% of its workforce and close some offices to reduce costs amid disappointing sales of newer titles. The restructuring will save an estimated $70 million to $80 million in pretax expenses. The cutbacks to be completed by August will result in restructuring charges of $24 million to $26 million in the second quarter and $2 million to $5 million in the third quarter. As a result of the layoffs and office closures, Zynga projects a second quarter net loss of between $39 …

In the last presidential race, Obama for America 2012 campaign workers had an idea for an email initiative. They wanted to wanted to send supporters emails that would include other people's names and phone numbers, with instructions to call them and make sure they went to the polls. The campaign believed that doing so would have been legal, but nonetheless decided against it, according to Rayid Ghani, Chief Scientist of the Obama for America 2012 campaign. Speaking at a conference on Friday about data and political campaigns, Ghana said that campaigns, in some respects, “stay far …