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.

A new analysis showing ecommerce is driving ad spending growth in Japan underlines the importance of a virtuous cycle, in which digital media drives ecommerce, and in turn, drives more media spending.

In a move that creates an alternative option to the ad industry's legacy media-buying systems provider MediaOcean, digital native Centro is teaming with Comcast's FreeWheel to offer a one-stop solution for managing campaigns end-to-end, from planning to bill payments.

Big Data is playing a big role in the government's war on illegal immigrants. Palantir, a real-time data analytics firm that is sometimes compared with Cambridge Analytica, has been working with the U.S. government's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division to process a variety of consumer data streams to identify and target individuals who have a propensity for being illegal immigrants.

Programmatic continues to be one of several emerging technologies that are reshaping marketing and media-buying into the near future, according to a new report.