The type of "scale" most often referred to in the digital ad industry revolves around size. But what about "scale" in terms of comparison? "The overall ecosystem is teetering dangerously [in favor] on the side of the buyer," said Jason Fairchild, co-founder of OpenX. Fairchild was speaking on the "Revenge of the SSP" panel at the RTB Insider Summit on Friday.

Programmatic buying promised to bring efficiency to the digital ad marketplace -- but it didn't come without issues, and one of the most pressing is transparency. Where did your money go? Did the ad work? How can you know? I spoke with Bill Lederer, chairman and CEO of MediaCrossing, about efficiency and transparency to find out where the programmatic market stands and where it's going.

The RTB 500 is a composite index much like Wall Street's S&P 500, but it represents the supply and demand of advertising impressions being traded publicly on Madison Avenue's audience exchanges rather than the supply and demand of shares of company stocks being traded publicly on financial exchanges. For the first time ever, there is "public" data on the market behavior of people who buy and sell media, and anyone with a bidding engine can peek into the open "bidstream."

Roughly a year after launching "RTM Daily," we're renaming this publication "Real-Time Daily." The mission remains the same: Covering the shift toward a real-time media, advertising and marketing marketplace powered by machines, data, and of course, people. One of my goals when I originally began championing the idea internally at MediaPost was to start covering Madison Avenue the way financial press reporters cover Wall Street's markets -- and to the extent possible, identify, develop and begin reporting on data, news and information that creates greater transparency for the advertising industry at large, not just the programmatic media trading parts of …

The term waterfall has many connotations, but in the ad technology business, it is usually used to describe how people and technology are used to manage the flow of demand from advertisers. The problem is that, up until now, it's been a little bit like the way water flows in the physical world -- always downhill. Now, a new generation of so-called SSPs -- or supply-side platforms -- is seeking to defy the natural effects of gravity and get demand to flow upstream.

Programmatic ad technologies have been put to use around the globe, and some recent reports pin Europe as one of the fastest growing regions of adoption. But that's not to say there isn't plenty of room left for growth overseas. One in four (25%) European marketers have never even heard of "programmatic," according to a new report from AppNexus, Warc and IAB Europe.

Whether the campaigns are automated or bought direct, marketers are increasingly focused on cross-device advertising because that's what consumer behavior is calling for. But what does the cross-device user look like? According to a new infographic from Drawbridge, an ad platform with a focus on cross-device marketing, the typical multi-device user has 2.5 devices.

"Advertising Age" reported yesterday afternoon that Procter & Gamble wants to buy 70% to 75% of its U.S. digital media programmatically by the end of this year, citing "people briefed on the company's plans." Doing so would be significant on multiple fronts. For one, P&G is a brand advertiser, not a direct-response advertiser. Programmatic has been commonly associated with direct-response advertising, sometimes with a negative connotation. Such a significant investment on P&G's part could transform that perception.

Adobe recently polled over 1,000 marketers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia on the topic of optimization, per a company blog post. The top 20% of businesses surveyed reported conversion rates of 4.5%, while the average was 2.6%. The report also found that the key focus of "optimization" is "personalization." That's a buzzwordy sentence, but I think it's important to note because it highlights the digital ad industry's focus on the individual, seemingly regardless of context. It goes hand-in-hand with the industry's interest in audience-buying instead of media-buying.

Ad tech providers are continually looking for new ways to ease publishers' concerns over control in a programmatic environment. Improve Digital, a supply-side platform (SSP), on Monday announced the launch of its "Pricing Control Centre," which the company claims gives its publisher partners a slew of new pricing control features. The move appears to be the supply-side's response to the various ways the buy-side now uses programmatic technologies.