On the eve of tomorrow's Forecast conference in New York City, I've been prepping my "2023" panel and all the obligatory near-future hot buttons that have come up in our preliminary discussions -- privacy/GDP, voice/search, AI, etc. -- but the one that has me thinking the most about the future of programmatic trading is blockchain and the prospects for creating a transparent, open ledger for trading "human attention."

Few metrics have defined value in the digital marketplace as much as the concept of "viewability." Late last week, the Media Rating Council released standards for audio-only digital ads that have nothing to view. But don't expect the standards to set a new industry benchmark for "audibility," because that's still in the eye -- er make that ear -- of the beholder. "In today's digital audio measurement, audibility is considered to be an imperfect analogy to the 'opportunity to see' proxy that viewability is in other digital measurements," the Media Rating Council explains in the final version of "Digital Audio …

The Centro study found that 81% of marketers plan to bring at least some of their programmatic advertising in-house over the next 12 months, while 59% said they will no longer outsource their programmatic media-buying to a third party by next year.

RTBlog was originally conceived to discuss the passage of time, specifically how advertising, media and marketing is affected by technology, data and platforms enabling it to occur in "real-time." So it's fitting, coming into a new year, to mark some passage of time -- past, present and future. Our marketplace's most recent past has been dominated by two players -- Google and Facebook -- and according to the present outlook, they will only become even more dominant in the not-too-distant future.