The first panelists at OMMA RTB in LA are talking viewability -- and none seem too thrilled with it.

How does one media agency group set a goal of 50% automation when it comes to media buying?  You look closely at lots of media and lot of data. But you still need to convince big media sellers -- TV networks. Fifty percent media buying automation in two years is a goal Matt Seiler, global chief executive officer at IPGMediabrands, set out for its Magna Global unit. This means more than the somewhat narrow “programmatic” focus. Speaking at OMMA Audience Targeting, Todd Gordon, executive vp, U.S. Head of Investment for Magna Global, says it comes about looking at how to apply data to all …

As senior vice president and general manager of digital solutions or IXI Services at Equifax, Jeff Sporn knows a lot about targeting consumers with some precise data, but he's not so impressed with the precision used by others. Citing a recent personal example in which he was targeted with an ad for Taco Bell after he and his wife refinanced their home mortgage, Sporn said the problem was that it was generated by a machine that didn't know how to filter his data signals properly.

Rivaling tech giants like Google and Facebook, Microsoft has vastly increased its tracking of online consumer behavior over the past few years. Updated every 30 days, the software leader presently boasts a database of "hundreds of millions of unique [user] IDs," according to Philip Stocker, West Coast Lead for Microsoft Advertising's Targeting and Programmatic business. That's thanks to the integration of Skype and Xbox sign-ins, among other tracking improvements, Stocker told attendees of OMMA's Audience Targeting conference, on Wednesday. As for Microsoft's big rivals, Stocker said Google's altruistic "do no evil" credo limits its tracking potential, while Facebook has no …

It's not all downside, you know. At least that's what Jeff Clark, vice president-audience and analytics at Postmedia seemed to suggest during the "publishers" panel at OMMA Audience Targeting. How so? Well, Clark advised using RTB as a prospecting tool to convert non-endemic advertisers into endemic ones.

"Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic." No, that wasn't a quote overheard at OMMA Audience Targeting in Los Angeles today. It was one flashed on a screen by Forrester Senior Analyst Susan Bidel during her research presentation.

The opening OMMA Audience Targeting "buyers" platform closed on a surprisingly dystopian note, with a number of panelists predicting that, within the next five years, most audience targeting will pass through uber "log-in" platforms like Facebook and Google.

As Chief Data Officer at Mindshare, you might expect Bob Ivins to portray the future of advertising as very, er, Terminator-like. But, no, the industry's "not all going to be some program," he assured attendees of OMMA's Audience Targeting conference, on Wednesday. "I don't think everything will move to math," he said. Not matter how good the algorithms get, advertising won't "always be a math expression." Why? For one, creativity can't be quantified (yet), Ivins said. Meanwhile, beyond larger patterns, people are really unpredictable. "I look at my own sporadic behavior when I walk into the grocery story," Ivins remarked. …

That's pretty much how Digitaria Manager of Analytics Kate Bartkiewicz summed up the state of the art of audience targeting right now. "We now have the opportunity to act on data that we do not own," she said, adding that while here clients have historically had a "strong CRM mentality" and collected "everything we can get on everyone," agencies and advertisers can now do that without actually needing to own the data they need to act on.

Everyone seems to be dipping in the same pool when it comes to big audience data -- and that’s not all that good. Speaking at OMMA Audience Targeting, Greg Johns, client director of digital strategy for Initiative+: “We are all chasing the same users, the same cookie. What concerns me is that the most ubiquitous sources of data are becoming diluted. The strategy for agencies, advertisers and publishers isn’t not whether you proficient in data advertising but how are you getting unique data sources... [You don’t want] 25 people fishing in the same barrel at the …