That giant sucking sound you've been hearing in the online display advertising marketplace apparently has been coming from where the pineapples grow. No, not Hawaii, but Menlo Park, CA, where Facebook is headquartered. The reason for the cryptic pineapple reference is that's the new code word industry insiders use when they want to refer to Facebook's business practices, when they are under contractual obligations not to mention the company by name. Actually, "pineapple" became the running joke during the OMMA RTB conference I emceed in San Francisco Monday, whenever anyone wanted to refer to anything that was somewhat NDAable.

Speaking at OMMA RTB in San Francisco today, Brian Monahan, managing partner, intelligence practice at Magna Global, spoke about the growth that RTB industry will see in years to come. Magna Global predicts that RTB will be a $3.3 billion industry in the US in 2013, with YOY growth of 39% (RTB video is not included in these numbers, just display in the US). The company predicts that the $3.3 billion will grow to over $7 billion by 2017. "We think that RTB display is about a quarter of the display market overall in the US, and think it will …

It's hard not to use overwrought metaphors when writing stories blog posts about cookies, but this one may be especially crumby. That's because much of the programmatic marketplace -- at least in the way we think about it today -- depends on those little data tracking crumbs, which enable people and machines to target (or retarget) users with speed and relative precision. So what happens if, as Mozilla is suggesting, cookies actually crumble. According to someone whose views I have profound respect for -- Pivotal Research Group's Brian Wieser -- not much. In a note sent to Wall Street investors …

Not that he needs my help, mind you, but I'd like to come to the defense of Irwin Gotlieb. You know, the most powerful man in media. Or at the very least, the most powerful man in our little world of media-buying -- and by extension -- real-time media trading too. Gotlieb, of course, is the global chief of WPP's GroupM and influences gazillions of dollars in brand spending across every major media platform, but he's gotten himself in a little trouble for doing what we should all admire in an industry leader: Being honest. The problem is that he's …

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 …