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.

It might be a good time for people in the business to actually go out and experience firsthand what their "end users" experience when they're standing inside a store and actually interacting with a brand at retail.

Mixed signals are coming from two reputable sources on the quality of programmatic ad inventory. Confiant says the overall quality of programmatic ad inventory rose to its highest tracked level in Q2; Pixalate says that nearly a fifth of all programmatic ad inventory still is fraudulent.

Two studies shed light on how ad execs and "average" consumers work and relax during the summer season.

A promising new developer, Hudson MX, has inked a deal with radio broadcasting giant Entercom to offer conventional radio ad inventory via a real-time transactional interface.

The latest advancement, from NCSolutions, lets marketers correlate actual in-store purchasing data with marketing inputs.