There have always been tensions between "creative" and "media," but as the two areas of advertising practice evolve from analogue to digital formats, the issues have expanded well beyond the roles of human practitioners to the machines they use. A great example of this is what some people are calling the impending "Flash Apocalypse," a problem that is occurring by upgrades to the major Web browsers that will essentially disallow any Flash-based ads. Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox are already blocking them and Google's Chrome is introducing "intelligent pausing," which effectively does the same thing. The solution is a relatively …

Viewability remains a controversial topic among advertisers. Is the MRC's standard enough? Why aren't rates rising? How important is viewability anyway? A handful of people have reached out to "Real-Time Daily" over the years to offer their thoughts on the topic.

Shrouded beneath Google's Alphabet announcement were two other announcements Google made this month to bolster its ad validation and media measurement capabilities.

Nearly two-and-a-half years ago, 'Real-Time Daily' spoke with data scientist Saed Sayad about his "predictive modeling" platform. Now he says he has built an even better version.

The audiences watching TV and digital video are (mostly) the same, so why not use the same data to reach them in both places? That's exactly what more and more marketers are doing.

Google this week announced it will remove YouTube inventory from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange by the end of the year. This is a "walled garden" being built before your very eyes. No, it's not a wall quite like the one from HBO's "Game of Thrones" -- a Google representative said to Real-Time Daily that the move will only impact a "relatively small amount of YouTube buying" -- but it does give YouTube, and therefore Google, an air of exclusivity.

The good news is that the advertising industry loves ad tech and has found plenty of applications for it. The bad news is that some love the tech blindly, a fact that could catch up to them sooner rather than later.

News broke earlier this week that hackers have been buying ads on real-time bidding (RTB) platforms and embedding them with RIG 3.0, which checks whether or not a person's computer is vulnerable and if it is, it loads a trojan virus. VentureBeat first reported the findings, which were uncovered by Trustwave Holdings.

Earning its "insta" prefix -- at least among advertisers -- Instagram has turned on its ads API to a number of partners to make advertising on the social site more real-time. It brings automation to Instagram ad-buying for the first time.

Advertising technologies continue to blend the digital and physical worlds. The most recent example of this trend is Time Inc.'s decision to expand its "programmatic print" offering by adding a dozen new print audience segments available for targeting via a demand-side platform (DSP) -- MediaMath.