In the spirit of Halloween, I wanted to do a quick rundown of some of the current trends and hot topics in the programmatic ad industry and decide whether they are tricks or treats. Viewability: Trick. This would be like going trick-or-treating and only getting candy half the time -- if you're lucky. The other half of the time people would only pretend to put candy in your bag.

This is "must-see TV." It's truly "mandatory viewing." Those phrases do not typically refer to commercials, but Clearstream, a video ad targeting platform, wants to change that. No -- not by making commercials so good they becomes must-see, but by literally forcing consumers to watch pre-roll ads. No more tabbing away or scrolling to read the comments while you wait for the ad to run its course. Real-Time Daily spoke with Brian Mandelbaum, founder of Clearstream, to chat about the new technology.

Programmatic has spread across devices, with the "arrival" of mobile serving as the catalyst. It should come as no surprise, then, to see a major holding company making several moves in the cross-device, mobile programmatic ad space. In the month of October, Publicis was front and center in the programmatic industry.

The notice had been given and the introduction made, and now cross-device advertising has arrived. In truth, cross-device advertising -- or cross-devicing, since everything needs to be shortened or acronymed these days -- arrived long before this column, but some new data, and some recent news headlines, says it's now here in full force.

Apparently publishers don't think too highly of the digital ad industry's monetization offerings -- or of their own. A recent research report found that most publishers gave themselves (and the industry) a "C" grade when it came to effective monetization of content.

Like a broken clock, digital marketers only get it right some of the time. They want to change that. A broken clock is right about .14% of the time -- only slightly worse than click-through rates, if that's your metric of choice. Or perhaps you're adopting viewability as the key metric. But even then, you're losing more often than you're winning. If you're really avant-garde, maybe you're thinking of time itself as a metric, a school of thought that apparently became huge overnight.

AppNexus, a large independent ad tech firm that sits as close to the "middle" of the ad tech ecosystem as any other, on Thursday announced the addition of Elisabeth DeMarse to its board of directors. DeMarse is chairman and CEO of TheStreet. Real-Time Daily caught up with DeMarse to pick her brain on the programmatic ad industry and to find out why she's working with AppNexus -- a private company -- when she has a sort of personal code to only sit on the board of public companies.

Mobile advertising, programmatic buying and location-based targeting have been quite the trio this week, with Swirl, Chitika, and PubMatic/xAd all announcing product launches featuring mobile, programmatic and location. Three stories, in three days, about the same three things.

Verve Mobile, a mobile ad network that has flirted with programmatic ad technology before, took a big step toward further embracing programmatic with the hiring of ad tech vet John Haake as chief marketing officer. Real-Time Daily caught up with Haake to discuss the intersecting roles of tech and marketing, Verve's vision of programmatic and where it's taking the mobile ad industry.

When it comes to real-time marketing, one thing advertisers often rely on are trends. But trends are fickle things: sometimes they are slow to rise and slow to die, and sometimes they are fast to rise and even faster to die. But what were the biggest trends of the last quarter, and how did marketers take advantage of them?