Madison Avenue loves bemoaning its love/hate relationship with digital's big "walled gardens," which hold the access to audiences as well as the means of targeting them, and it looks like they're poised to let the same thing happen with the next generation of TV.

MONTAUK, NY -- Media companies are using free or discounted access to attract new subscribers, but it is the underlying value of data that can be used to market or re-market to them that is perhaps the greatest potential asset.

For those of you still trying to get your arms around attribution modeling, you can forget about it -- at least the current versions representing a litany of black boxes all claiming to provide the elusive Holy Grail for understanding your return on media investments. That's because we are entering a second generation that will provide standards, accountability and a common language for the inputs and outputs of industry-sanctioned models in what might well be called, "attribution 2.0."

The biggest problem with modern day media-buying is that the ad industry has been optimizing the wrong thing: impressions. Yes, the industry uses a variety of factors to identify the best impressions, including user IDs, profiles, "viewability," and a number of contextual weights to ensure that brands target the most "premium" inventory. The problem is it's still utilizing and "opportunity to see" model in an era of infinite choice and hyper-fragmentation when the only thing that really matters is whether someone sees and engages with your ad.