In one of the most surprising temporal mash-ups of consumer data flow I've seen yet, real-world data targeting firm TruSignal has developed a method for integrating offline consumer profiles with BlueKai's real-time, "in-market" consumer behavior data. The result is a new form of pseudo-targeting TruSignal President David Dowhan calls "interest-based lookalikes."

What happens when real-time marketing meets the real world? We're about to find out, as a number of players have been developing the infrastructure necessary to target and serve ads to consumers in physical locations with the same speed and computer processing power as online's programmatic-buying platforms. And I'm not just talking about mobile, which is an obvious means of serving ads to people based on their geographic proximities -- I'm talking about good old-fashioned brick-and-mortar. You know, retail.

When Seattle-based eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson was visiting New York recently, I was delighted that she took some of her real time to meet with me. For two reasons. One is that I hadn't seen her in about 20 years (we worked together at 'Advertising Age' in the early 1990s, and as I recall, she was a great writer and a pretty tough copyeditor). The other reason is that she has just completed a report -- eMarketer's first -- on real-time marketing, and it gave me an opportunity to compare notes and dig into her perspective on the rapidly ...

For those looking to take advantage of real-time marketing on Facebook's new photo-centric news feed, quality has never been more important. Online Media Daily wrote yesterday that according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, "...the redesign was guided by three factors: letting people tell richer 'stories,' providing a choice of feeds, and offering a consistent look and feel across platforms." But Zuckerberg left out a fourth factor, which AdAge was able to pinpoint in a headline: "Facebook news feed redesign gives marketers what they've pined for: bigger ads." The pictures (and ads) will fit right into the news feed's stream, where ...

You may have noticed some of my coverage the past couple of days elsewhere on MediaPost about a new source of real media-buying data. The data from Australian start-up Standard Media Index, is derived directly from the data processing systems of four of the six big agency holding companies -- Aegis, Havas, Interpublic and Publicis -- and it is revealing some surprising truths about the relative shares and volumes of all media, but especially digital. On Wednesday, we reported that there has been a dramatic slowdown in the premium online display ad marketplace, due in part to the extraordinary growth ...

TubeMogul today announced that real-time buying of smartphone and tablet interactive video inventory is now available on their platform. The ads are available as pre-rolls, messages when an app is loading, or messages in between levels of a game. The interactivity of the ads include functions such "click-to-calendar" to add to a calendar event, or "click-for-location" to find the nearest retail stores. This type of interactivity is nothing new, but it will likely work. If people are willing to click on obvious spam messages - "Free iPad 9! Click here!" - then they are going to be willing to click ...

One of the most important things I've learned in the time we've been publishing RTM Daily is there is no such thing as "real-time." The reality is that time is relative, and quite often, asynchronous depending on who -- or as the case may be -- what is applying it. The who, of course, is people. The what, increasingly, is machines. And the more machines speed up the way in which people process time, the nuttier we humans seem to get. That's one of the reasons I was happy to see Varick Media Management has published "Man + Machine," a ...

It's been one month since Oreo brought the term "real-time marketing" into the limelight, but the Huffington Post believes that its 15 minutes of fame could already be over. Real-time marketing has been around since brands have existed in one way or another. But the Huffington Post article, and this RTBlog, speaks of real-time marketing in the context of using Twitter to promote brands during real-time events, like the Super Bowl or the Oscars. In this context, burying "real-time marketing" after an underwhelming display by brands at the Oscars would be jumping the gun. A Convince and Convert article from ...

It's not quite at the "I, Robot" level (yet), but the humans vs. machines debate is both popular and important. The three-martini lunch might exclusively belong in episodes of Mad Men nowadays, but where is all of the automation driving one-on-one relationships between publishers and advertisers? Yesterday's Quote Of The Day touched on the subject of the human's role in advertising. It said, "'There's always the art piece to it. There's always the intuitive piece. I worry about the science becoming too much of a focus. The balance has gotten out of kilter.' -- WPP Chief Martin Sorrell responding to ...