Once a time for little but repeats, reality, and game shows, the summer months are now filled with original scripted series - several on cable networks, but many you may never have heard of on streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and CBS All Access, as well. In this week's edition, I offer my picks for the best series you may not have heard about, but should check out over the summer. Each has at least two seasons worth of episodes you can binge. I'll try my best not to provide spoilers.

Television sets are emerging as the dominant way consumers connect with connected TV (CTV), according to a quarterly tracking study from ad tech firm Extreme Reach. Connected television sets accounted for a 49% share of CTV impressions during the first quarter of 2019, up from just 31% the same quarter a year ago.

This just in: New research from Nielsen finds just 8% of consumers are now deemed "firmly committed" brand loyalists. The stat, one of several findings in a just-released Nielsen bulletin -- "Consumer Disloyalty Is The New Normal" -- indicate brand loyalty has become more volatile than ever.

Less than half (48%) of ad execs say they currently have the ability to accurately measure digital ad fraud and/or non-human traffic, but almost all of them believe it is eating into significant shares of their ad budgets. On average, ad execs say 12.6% of their digital ad budgets are going to fraudulent forms of advertising, according to findings of a study conducted by Advertiser Perceptions earlier this year.

Media planners are more bullish for allocating ad budgets to digital out-of-home media over the next two years than they were two years ago, according to findings of survey of planners released this week by the Digital Place-Based Advertising Association (DPAA). The study, which is based on responses from 219 planners surveyed in the fourth quarter of 2018, indicates they are more prone to utilize digital out-of-home for a variety of reasons, but especially increased availability of programmatic media-buying systems, various attribution systems, and mobile media tie-ins.

Asked what they would charge companies for use of their personal data, American consumers express a wide range of dollar value -- from a median of about $50 for things like their name, address, email, shopping or employment history to $1,000 or more for more sensitive information such as their passport number, banking information, social security number of biometric data.

It might seem like a marketing cliche that legalizing recreational cannabis sales would lead to a spike in snacking -- you know, the "munchies" -- but that's exactly what the consumer marketing analytics team at Nielsen found when they indexed confectionary and total snack sales in states that have legalized recreational use vs. those that have not. While it likely is a cause-and-effect analysis to some extent, Nielsen found candy sales are growing half again faster and total snack sales have risen 20% faster in those states that have legalized cannabis.

I've been analyzing television programming for roughly 30 years, and have seen many good pilots flop as regular series, but also more than a few poor performing pilots build into hits. Increasingly, however, the latter is harder to come by. In this week's edition, I provide guidelines to help you pick the "Seinfelds," "Miami Vices" or "Everybody Loves Ramonds" in the rough.

More than one-in-five (21%) of single American adults will utilize a dating app this year, according to new estimates published today by eMarketer.

If there was any doubt that marketers have shifted to a "performance" mindset from an "awareness" oriented one, a new study released today by he World Federation of Advertisers should put that to rest.