A consensus has emerged that first-party data -- especially the kind collected by digital publishers to identify their users -- is emerging as the logical replacement solution to digital 1.0's browser cookies. Getting there is an ongoing process that will require some ingenuity and innovation. The truth is that we're in a transition period from one world to another, and the current marketplace is more of a hybrid solution of browser cookies, when and where they still work, and efforts to organize a critical mass of publishers' first-party user identification data, which for all intent and purposes, is a publisher-side ...

There was some interesting math in what The Trade Desk presented to investors, analysts and the press in last week's Q3 earnings release. No, not its actual earnings, which remain healthy despite some tepid international growth, but in the dimensions it uses to describe the ad experience the average consumer is exposed to daily.

More than half of consumers now expect a brand to respond to a crisis within an hour of it becoming public, while more than a third expect brands to respond within a half hour.

Madison Avenue loves bemoaning its love/hate relationship with digital's big "walled gardens," which hold the access to audiences as well as the means of targeting them, and it looks like they're poised to let the same thing happen with the next generation of TV.

MONTAUK, NY -- Media companies are using free or discounted access to attract new subscribers, but it is the underlying value of data that can be used to market or re-market to them that is perhaps the greatest potential asset.

For those of you still trying to get your arms around attribution modeling, you can forget about it -- at least the current versions representing a litany of black boxes all claiming to provide the elusive Holy Grail for understanding your return on media investments. That's because we are entering a second generation that will provide standards, accountability and a common language for the inputs and outputs of industry-sanctioned models in what might well be called, "attribution 2.0."

The biggest problem with modern day media-buying is that the ad industry has been optimizing the wrong thing: impressions. Yes, the industry uses a variety of factors to identify the best impressions, including user IDs, profiles, "viewability," and a number of contextual weights to ensure that brands target the most "premium" inventory. The problem is it's still utilizing and "opportunity to see" model in an era of infinite choice and hyper-fragmentation when the only thing that really matters is whether someone sees and engages with your ad.

Xaxis is shifting from simply using data to identify and target people to finding the right messages to target them with.

The migration of viewers from linear TV to online video has some obvious advertising casualties, but there also is one less-than-obvious beneficiary: digital out-of-home advertising, especially place-based video networks. What's the connection? To find out in detail, stop by Needham & Co. Managing Director Laura Martin's session at the upcoming DPAA summit in New York on Oct. 15, but in a preview interview late last week, Martin gave me the heads up to share with you.

The programmatic digital ad marketplace appears to be stable amid signs of a potential economic downturn, but its expansion appears to be decelerating, according to monthly ad budget sentiment tracking by Wall Street equities firm Pivotal Research Group. Analyzing the net difference among ad execs accelerating vs. those decelerating their ad budgets on The Trade Desk, the dominant supply-side programmatic media-buying platform (see market share responses below) and a publicly traded one, Pivotal's tracking shows the net accelerating has eroded from 38% in May to 27% in August.