With only weeks to go before this year's CES kicks off, I spoke with StoryTech founder Lori Schwartz about what she has learned over the past few years and what she is most looking forward to this year. Buckle up!

More than 77% of the top 5,000 sites now utilize ads.txt -- overall, delivering invalid traffic rates that are 22% lower than sites that have not.

What if instead of relying on the current loony scape of programmatic media-buying, big advertisers built their own plumbing from scratch, cutting out the multitude of ad tech middlemen? That's exactly what some big advertisers have begun doing as part of a unique beta project to develop a pipeline that connects directly with their supply chain of publishers, cutting out intermediaries, and with it, the so-called "death by a thousand cuts" that eats up the majority of their working media budget.

It's beginning to look a lot like a record holiday shopping season. Based on early results from Black Friday and projections for today's "Cyber Monday," e-commerce sales are on track to surpass previous records by a couple of billion dollars. "Numerous sources indicate solid holiday sales for the Thanksgiving weekend and holiday season-to-date and we remain comfortable with our expectation for mid-teens e-commerce holiday season growth," the equities research team at Raymond James confirmed in a round-up of leading indicators.

A year after launching the Advertising Trust & Transparency Forum and proposing the formation of an "advertising contract exchange," the ad hoc group has delivered on its promise. The exchange, dubbed ACE (for Advertising Contract Exchange), is being hosted by the American Advertising Federation (AAF) and functions like a glossary of terms that represent best practices and guidelines for defining terms and using language in contracts between advertisers, agencies, the media and various third parties who help process it.

In the battle of media format dominance, video still commands much of Madison Avenue's attention, as well as its highest CPMs, but audio is ascending again, thanks to the ad world's obsession with emerging voice-activated technologies, especially smart speakers and the ilk.

Big startup ideas sometimes emerge before the marketplace is ready to embrace them, or miss the market altogether. Simulmedia's new direct-to-consumer media-buying platform is just right, and here's why.

A powerful new DMP providing "second-party" data from thousands of retailers and brands revealing the journey of how, what, when, where and why consumers make their purchases online has just rolled out. And best of all, it's completely free to use.

A startling new analysis from third-party ad server Flashtalking confirms what many have long suspected: that click-throughs are a poor digital campaign performance metric. The analysis, which is published in a Creative Analytics Report that Flashtalking began circulated last week, uses a proprietary metric -- the Creative Performance Index (CPI) -- which measures the relative effectiveness of each campaign's delivery of its campaign objectives.

Two big studies being released this week indicate programmatic is having a profound effect on media planning and buying.