I was already thinking about the role blockchain may or may not play in digital media buying, especially the programmatic kind, before Parsec's Marc Guldimann circulated a well organized assessment of some leading digital media-buying blockchain solutions Sunday.

Our industry loves a good party, but lately, it's become obsessed with the first, second and third kind. Here's my first-person account of how Home Depot turned me into a third party that was somebody else's problem: mine.

There's an interesting sidebar in the "Video Ad Spend" study released last week by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on the eve of this year's NewFronts. No, not that there's pent up demand from advertisers and agencies for digital video, especially the kind of original digital video represented by IAB members pitching their wares in this year's advance sales season. That should be expected. It's the side note about the role programmatic is playing in the mix. While the "availability of programmatic buying" ranked only ninth among 14 criteria reported in the survey of advertisers and agency executives, it was ...

If the Advertising Research Foundation's Town Hall on the ad industry's code of conduct concerning data collection and consumer privacy is any indication, don't expect a consensus anytime soon. The panel discussion could be summarized as a debate between two opposing philosophical views: One represented by Rolfe Swinton, director of data assets at Germany's GfK, who took the progressive view on consumer's right to data self-sovereignty, popular among Europeans; and another held by digital ad tech native Rick Bruner, who had a more laissez-faire view that no real harm is done to consumers by using their personal data to target ...

Maybe it's because I'm utterly confused by the second season opener of "Westworld" Sunday night, but I'm thinking a lot about humans this morning, especially the notion that the more we become a machine-oriented as species, the more we need human beings to govern those machines to make sure they're serving the right masters and optimizing the correct outputs. But the real reason I'm thinking this way is a couple of news announcements about some human talent plays.

Native advertising and "content discovery" platform Taboola has an ambitious plan to help people discover even more content, specifically "news." The company, which is best known for enabling brands to scale native advertising across the open Web, has struck a deal to operate a news feed app on people's phones. "It's like Apple News," boasts Adam Singolda, who founded Taboola 11 years ago and serves as its CEO. Unlike Apple News, Taboola's news reader is native to Android phones, and its first deal enables it to distribute on devices manufactured by ZTE, the fourth largest phone brand in the U.S. ...

eMarketer's revised U.S. programmatic display advertising estimates show that auction-based real-time bidding now comprises less than a quarter of the total programmatic display advertising marketplace. Presumably, much of that goes to the "long-tail": smaller marketers and platforms optimizing, leveraging and "mopping up" display ad inventory not optimized by the more direct and controllable programmatic markets.

If I had received Wall Street analyst Brian Wieser's most recent note to investors a day earlier, I would have thought it was an April Fool's prank, but the fact that it is datelined April 2nd, affirms that it starts off with Wieser's perennial sense of humor: A mock exchange between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining his infamous "dumb as f***s" quip to a Senators at a Congressional hearing on consumer data privacy slated for later this month.

I couldn't. Well, technically, I couldn't "delete" it, but I was able to "deactivate" it, making me think that Facebook owns the past decade of my presence on its platform for perpetuity. According to its notification to me, the deactivation merely disabled my profile and removed my name and photo from most of the things I've shared on Facebook. "Some information may still be visible to others, such as your name in their friends list and messages you sent."

If advanced audience-targeting platform Cambridge Analytica was -- as critics have charged -- used as a form of "weaponized propaganda" during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, then Facebook was its ammunition. That's one of the epiphanies revealed in a series of stories published by "The New York Times" over the weekend, which reported that Cambridge Analytica "harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission," which the paper described as a data "breach" enabling those users to be targeted based on their "private social media activity."