Maybe I'm just reading between the lines, but I thought there were some telling things said by media buyers during MEDIA magazine's Outfront Forum in NYC Tuesday that suggest the science of programmatic audience buying may soon begin to impact the way they buy television, as well as online media. The forum was a little unusual, for sure, with some journalists, including myself, role-playing TV network sales executives in a mock debate with some of Madison Avenue's biggest media buyers. I say mock, but there were some really important things said. When moderator David Verklin posed the question about the …

I saw a recent interview with Jonathon Rosen, business development director for WirelessWERX in Directions Magazine about real-time indoor location analytics. Rosen's company places sensors around a store that communicate with customers' mobile phones anonymously to collect data. The data is processed in real-time, and the store ends up with heat maps based on traffic, the path the consumer took around the store, and more. It all made me think: when does cool and convenient turn creepy? Recently, Berg Insight predicted that location-based advertising will reach $8.5 billion (up from $688 million) by 2017. Clearly, the idea of knowing where …

The other day I wrote about some new data from a variety of sources -- the IAB, Pivotal Research Group and Accordant Media -- indicating that the expansion of the exchange-based media marketplace might be taking some steam out of the overall growth of digital media, mainly because of their contribution to the overall efficiency of digital marketing campaigns. If that's the case, it's most likely coming from long- and mid-tail marketers and agencies, because some important new data suggests it's still a tiny share of what's being bought by the big agency holding companies. The data, which comes from …

The thing I like about our marketplace is that it's based on efficiency and reason, of course. What I love about it, is how transparent it is. Because without transparency -- the free flow of information -- how can you have a genuine value exchange? So let's agree that's a good thing. If it is, then the data released today by Accordant Media is a good sign that we're moving in the right direction.

You've probably seen the headlines that online ad growth set another record, right? But if you look below the top line of the the IAB's Internet ad report, you'll see that most of that growth is coming not from the premium display advertising marketplace, but from two big biddable inventory sources: Google and Facebook. "While total online advertising posted a solid growth rate of 15% during 2012, we can clearly see that if we strip out growth from Google and Facebook, the rest of online advertising likely grew by 3.8%," Pivotal Research Group's Brian Wieser said in an equity research …

At the end of a sports season, the league's top performer receives an MVP award. In the advertising world, isn't it time we started to recognize the MVA (Most Valuable Audience)? New research from cloud marketing platform Turn shows that brands spend 85% more to reach the top 2% of online consumers on real-time marketplaces. The report says that those 2% of online consumers are shown 24 times the amount of ads as the average digital consumer. The data was collected from RTB marketplaces between January and March 2013. So what does that 2% look like? Drumroll please...

I sat down with Netmining chief Chris Hansen the other day, and I began our conversation by asking him a few questions I seem to be asking most people these days: What are you, what do you do, and what differentiates you from others like you? His answers surprised me. Not because they were complex, cryptic and full of gobbledegook. Just the opposite. He was crystal clear and incredibly simple in his description. "We're an ad network," he said candidly. That impressed me, because it's one of those things most ad tech players avoid comparing themselves to. I'm not sure …

This report isn't exactly coming in real-time, but Casale Media today released their Index Quarterly Report from Q3-Q4, 2012. Casale offered RTM Daily an exclusive look at section two of the report: Market CPMs. The report takes a look at average winning bid price (WBP), number of bids per impressions (BPI), and clear price (CP). The data comes from programmatic transactions made in the U.S. via Casale's Index platform. In Q4 2012, the WBP was only 4% higher compared to Q3. Auto and Media remained the leading sectors in terms of average WBP. Retail moved from number six to number …

Last week, a Forrester Consulting report about Rocket Fuel touted the benefits of going all-in with automation. The report stated that programmatic platforms entirely powered by artificial intelligence deliver "substantial increase[s] in average campaign ROI" when compared to campaigns that use a mix of automation and manual optimization. That statement raised an increasingly important issue within the industry. How much automation should there be? Rocket Fuel likes the idea of total automation, but others think that humans have certain intuitive qualities that will always be neccesary when trading media. RTM Daily spoke with Richard Frankel, Rocket Fuel's president and co-founder, …

The main problem concerning the role of programmatic-buying in the video marketplace isn't technology or business models. It's the way people think about the supply of video. The people who have been most vocal in the debate tend to be people and organizations who have a vested interest in making that supply look constrained. They say there simply is not enough video advertising inventory to justify programmatic trading. They also provoke fear among video publishers that if they put their inventory into exchange-based markets, their inventory will become commoditized due to the dynamics of real-time bidding. Let's put aside the …