Apologies if today's "RTBlog" isn't technically about technology, but it is about something happening in real time.

It's no secret to programmatic traders that location tracking has become one of the most important signals for identifying and targeting users in a post-cookie world. Yes, device IDs are still the most indelible hook, but tracking where those devices are, have been and are going to is the new gold rush in consumer data tracking. The problem is that it's no longer a secret to most users either.

It makes sense that programmatic would emerge as a viable solution for cannabis brand marketers to target consumers in a regulatory-compliant way.

The practice, which effectively cached and kept reusing an advertiser's bid request until it yielded a win, was a short-term boon for Index Exchange, which started using it without anyone's knowledge. Well, it's back -- but now fully transparent, and being tested by OpenX as part of advertisers' private marketplace deals.

Despite the emergence of a Golden Age of data and ad tech, the ad industry still has fundamentally valued media either on an "opportunity-to-see" or a performance basis.That's about to change as several key developments begin shifting the industry to measuring what has actually been seen or heard, and perhaps most importantly, what people actually paid attention to.