Given the fact that July is in the heat of the summer, it's no surprise that the 10 most expensive segments on programmatic ad exchanges last month were all travel-related. In other segments, foreign car brand advertising was cheaper on programmatic exchanges last month, while domestic brands saw prices increase.

Publicis Groupe's VivaKi recently released a whitepaper on programmatic media attribution, arguing that marketers can be gamed if they aren't careful. Real-Time Daily spoke with Shirley Xu-Weldon, VP of analytics at VivaKi, about the whitepaper, and she said the core question marketers need to understand when it comes to programmatic attribution is: "How do you understand the difference between someone trying to steal attribution credit and making it look 'good,' versus a partner that's really adding incremental and true value to your media plan?"

The new survey results from AOL, which reveal that 90% of ad buyers are using programmatic in some capacity, brought a few things to my attention. First, the report supports a theory of mine -- that the ad industry's worst enemy is often itself. I also noticed that the report didn't cover radio or digital out-of-home (DOOH).

Sizmek, an ad management platform, has made a number of moves in recent months to position itself for a programmatic future, including the launch of a team of RTB specialists to help buyers shift budgets. "Real-Time Daily" caught up with Mike Caprio, GM of the new RTB team (called Sizmek Vantage), to talk about the company's recent moves, including which players on the buy-side are using the Vantage group (and how they are using it). Caprio also touches on this fragmented market and how brands are taking more ownership.

"I can tell you 'exchange' is the new 'ad network'," a communications expert who works with several ad tech companies said to me. "Everyone I work with avoids the term." It's all part of the semantics dance that companies are using to remain differentiated and be oh so avant-garde. It's not a new dance, either -- during the dot-com boom, companies were e-companies or .com companies.

I had the opportunity to speak with Avi Spivack, director of product marketing at Adroit Digital, about the ad tech market. While many hail M&A activity and are pleased to see the space become less crowded and more consolidated, Spivack is aware that it has come at the expense of neutral media measurement companies -- companies that benefitted all.

This week, Rocket Fuel announced its intention to acquire [x+1] for roughly $230 million. The deal is significant because both companies have established themselves as major players in the ad tech space. Here are some comments from industry leaders regarding the deal.

I recently spoke with Forensiq's David Sendroff, founder and CEO, and Dean Harris, the company's chief marketing officer, about digital ad fraud in the programmatic space. Rather than letting numbers tell the story, Sendroff showed me what digital ad fraud actually looks like. It left an impression on me, so I have devoted today's RTBlog to thoughts about ad fraud.

Stoddard + Partners, a media group out of Santa Monica, Calif., on Tuesday announced it has created two new attribution tools -- one to measure TV ad effectiveness and the other to measure brick-and-mortar foot traffic. S+P owns and operates four boutique agencies. The launch of the tools is representative of agencies building their own "tech stacks" to compete with pure tech vendors.

A recent Madison & Wall report from Pivotal Research's Brian Wieser spells out "why ad tech matters to media," and one of the more important points, in my opinion, is what ad tech has enabled media buyers to do: buy audiences. Rather than being apocalyptic, there's a crossroads approaching where media brands and their content intersect with buy-side brands and the audiences they want to reach.