As far as industrial roadways go, Madison Avenue has lost its luster on Wall Street. That is more or less what the subject line of an email dispatch from "Campaign" magazine suggested this morning, teasing: "Are Holding Companies Undervalued?"

As someone who has dived pretty deep into the weeds of consumer data sovereignty models over the past few years, this one seems squeaky clean to me.

During a year in which norms were challenged on almost every front, the most-read "RTBlog" columns focused mostly on normal programmatic and real-time media-buying issues, not the bigger existential threats surrounding them.

As 2020 comes to an end, will next year return to a more balanced sense of reality? You know, one based on facts, not divisive demagoguery?

If a modern day Dante were to write a "Marketing Inferno," a special circle should be reserved for Facebook. It should go to 11 for launching an advocacy campaign targeting Apple by exploiting the very thing it claims it wants to protect: small businesses.

Coming out of what may well be the greatest year of self-reflection for all of society, the ad industry had a huge opportunity to define its sense of purpose and it just blew it.

On the heels of last week's column predicting we are poised to see a dramatic resurgence in contextual targeting, I received a flurry of new announcements leaning back into contextual, including a new offering from Comscore and MediaMath, UM's Primis, Integral Ad Science, and others.

Among the solutions being proffered for the ongoing deprecation of the cookie is returning to a method of targeting people based on what interested them to land on a piece of content in the first place: its context.

As we head into the first of America's big holiday and shopping season events, it may be comforting to know that most of us haven't been losing much sleep during the pandemic. But maybe we should be.

The big loser of the 2020 election was political polling -- and by extension -- survey-based consumer research. While caveats abound, it largely failed, raising questions about how good polling is not just for political campaigns, but for any form of marketing.