When it comes to implementing and managing cross-channel video ad campaigns, Amobee, 4C and Adobe ranked as the most differentiated of 13 major platforms evaluated by Forrester Research, according to the firm's just released "Cross-Channel Video Advertising Platforms" third quarter "Wave" report.

The confidence top marketers have in the overall U.S. economy rebounded slightly in August after crashing in February, according to the most recent twice annual survey from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. That said, the current "optimism" index still is well below recent highs for the past several years.

Securities firm UBS has compiled data from company reports and the trade press, noting that on average, the major broadcast networks all yielded double-digit CPM gains on healthy single digital volume gains for prime-time sales.

TV has reached a new tipping point, as more than half of all viewing is now accounted for by viewers 55-plus, according to an analysis of Nielsen data published by UBS. The report notes that the demographic is "one that advertisers rarely seek to reach," and that it's composition of total TV viewing is up 36% from 2012.

In the era of "peak TV," with more viewing choices available than ever before, it takes viewers longer to even become aware of a new series, much less start watching it. This makes effective on-air promotion (still the best way to create such awareness) more important than ever. The broadcast networks' lack of effective new series promotion is stunning. In this week's edition, I return to the subject, because it warrants being repeated over and over again, until the networks' listen.

The volume of programmatic ads that could be categorized as questionable -- explicitly malicious ones, in-banner video, and ones violating explicit quality criteria -- has fallen to its lowest percentage since a leading cybersecurity company began tracking them five quarters ago. "We saw notable declines in the rates of malicious and in-banner video ads," Confiant says in its just-released Q2 2019 Demand Quality Report, noting that in-banner ads "plummeted" to just 0.1% of the total ad impressions it tracked during the quarter, down from 0.45% in the first quarter, and two to three times that rate in previous quarters.

Johnson & Johnson's Band Aid currently is the "healthiest" brand in America, according to the 2019 edition of an annual tracking study by YouGov's Brand Index. Interestingly, all of the top 10 healthiest brands are relatively established ones, including the most relative newcomer, Netflix.

Citing renewed attention to gun violence as their primary driver regarding trust in TV news brands, viewers indicated significantly higher trust levels for MSNBC and much lower levels for Fox News and President Trump.

Amid the heightened political turmoil and moves by the major social media platforms Twitter and Facebook to curtail state-sponsored disinformation, eMarketer has released data showing the impact on Hong Kong's social media usage base. Based on eMarketer's estimates, Facebook is a far more significant source of information for Hong Kong's population.

When it comes to "leisure time" activities, advertising executives say they participate in them more than consumers do, according to findings of two separate studies asking each group how they spend their leisure time.