Advertising Age recently released its Top 200 ad spenders in 2014, noting that there's a general shift toward digital and pointing out that those top 200 spenders accounted for over half (51%) of U.S.-measured media ad-spending last year. One thing sticks out: Advertising Age's Top 10 list is laden with companies that are leading the programmatic revolution as well.

As marketing and technology converge, so too do the people pulling the strings -- or in the case of ad technology, the people typing the code. The "traditional" roles of CMO (chief marketing officer) and CTO (chief technology officer) are blending into a hybrid role, giving birth to a new chief of ad tech: the Chief Marketing Technologist.

Microsoft this week released a preview of its Microsoft Health Cloud APIs, which Programmable Web said represents "an early step in Microsoft's goal to provide programmatic access to Microsoft Health products and associated data." And here's where I get ahead of myself: How long before this (extremely) personal data gets used for real-time, programmatic advertising purposes?

Cox Media Group's digital media services company, Gamut, which operates a programmatic ad exchange, is aiming to simplify programmatic for publishers. The company on Tuesday announced Gamut Navigator, a browser plugin that's meant to give publishers easy access to information about ads showing on their site.

Digital marketers are wasting a lot of money. Like, over 100 Super Bowl's worth of money. Not 100 Super Bowl ads, but every ad shown in the next 100 Super Bowls. Proxima's worst case scenario has U.S. and UK digital marketers wasting about $37 billion in advertising this year, and it gets to that high number through some relatively straightforward math. And that's just marketers here in the U.S. and in the UK.

TV ad tech firm Simulmedia has long -- with long being a relative term here, as the company was founded in 2009 -- emulated a programmatic digital marketplace for television, but it is now also enabling pure-play digital marketers, namely app and game developers, to leverage TV as a marketing medium. The company is doing this through the launch of a new business unit named SimulX, which aims to help mobile app developers get targeted TV campaigns up and running.

Publishers are about to get their hands on demand-side technology. Digital ad tech firm Centro has released its latest tech platform, dubbed the Centro DSP for Publishers. It's a demand-side platform (DSP) designed for audience extension. It enables publishers to scale campaigns and reach audiences outside of owned and operated properties, Centro asserts.

Unlike other large brands that have taken programmatic ad technologies in-house in a bid to have more control over their automated campaigns, Lenovo is asserting its authority in its own way. The personal computer company on Tuesday announced it has partnered with Integral Ad Science, an ad quality and media measurement firm. Lenovo will require each media agency it works with to use Integral's tech.

We had a good run going here at "Real-Time Daily" exposing all of the putrid PR pitches via "Hyperbabble of the Day," but it has slowed down in recent months. Perhaps the ad tech industry had matured enough that hyperbolic blather was no longer necessary. Think again. The hyperbabblers have risen again.

Big Data fiends are quickly coming to realize that having hordes of data and making use of that data are not one and the same. The data, in and of itself, is meaningless. Data needs a curator. If it sits unused in a data management platform for months or years, its only purpose is to fluff up the amount of "Big Data" that some proud marketer proclaims to orchestrate. A new research report from Millward Brown Digital reiterates this point, noting that "data rich, but insights poor" is the "current blight of the marketer."