Recent quotes:

End of an era: Media buyers are ditching the much-hated RFP - Digiday

Driving the shift is that agencies are consolidating their spending with fewer media sellers so there’s less need to cast a wide net with the RFP. More buyers are pursing the mantra of “fewer but deeper” relationships with buyers, especially as bigger chunks of budgets are run through programmatic (and, of course, Google and Facebook) as the workhorse for campaigns to get reach.

Confessions of a media buyer: 'It’s a game right now of how cheap you can be' - Digiday

Clients squeezed us for years by cutting down. These fees or commissions often helped us drive head count. It’s a game right now of how cheap you can be. What they want to know is you’re doing everything possible to give them the lowest rate. Some clients have taken it to the extreme in the way that we have to justify every single thing that is bought. Every P&L has to be completely outlined. They want to know everything from how much they’re paying a demand-side platform to more. They’ve taken it to the extreme. I’ve now had clients who won’t run with certain partners unless they in turn disclose what commissions they’re making. They even ask to be provided with the actual insertion orders from agency and vendor.

'Buying Traffic Is The Way Of The Future,' Says CEO Who Made $400,000 From A Single Slideshow Last Year | AdExchanger

But getting that $400,000 required buying about $200,000 of native ads to drive traffic to the content. Topix gets readers to consume slideshows by buying native ads on Facebook, Yahoo, Outbrain and Taboola. Think of Topix as a content arbitrage company. It has developed technology that allows it to buy clicks for cheap, knowing that its slideshow format will let it make more than what it paid for that initial click. Topix profits from the spread between what it pays in advertising and what it earns in advertising. CEO Chris Tolles defends his model, arguing that similar pubs create clickbait while he creates quality content. For example, that $400,000 slideshow? “23 Hilarious Hipster Wedding Trends That Need To Stop.”

First of Three Signs of the Adpocalypse | LinkedIn

Ad fraud is larger than anyone thought. The first of three signs of the impending adpocalypse has already been revealed - video ad fraud. It was far larger than anyone thought. There will be two more signs revealed in the coming year -- mobile ad fraud is larger than anyone thought; and ad fraud in China, India and other younger programmatic countries will be so pervasive it almost cannot be believed.

Programmatic pays off for P&G

P&G is seeing "three to five times greater ROI through programmatic buying than we are through traditional environments."

Gawker ad deets

The Automated Advertising group—which includes commerce, promotions and partnerships with native advertising networks and external platforms—has nearly doubled in revenue in 2015. Commerce is set to generate $150m this year for merchant partners.
For Google, this is an evolution of its recent programmatic strategy that attracted brands to automated buying methods by carefully selecting the publishers that could participate. Still, one of the drawbacks had been this lack of high-profile ad inventory, which is necessary for entertainment brands like ABC. "When you introduce a new TV show, you need a lot of space to get the message across," said Ben Blatt, executive director of digital strategy at ABC Television. For Rising Star, ABC took over the masthead at sites like Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men's Journal. The network was able to automate the process of buying these homepage-dominating ads across the Web without approaching every individual publisher. "We were able to run large mastheads in places we were never able to do before and spread out who's seeing our message," Blatt said. The private exchange not only automates the way ads are placed and when, but it also uses data to better target the messages to consumers.
Here's how Mediabrands CEO Matt Seiler expressed it in a recent AdExchanger interview: "If you push for automation you've got to find a different way to be compensated. Because if it means you stripping out a bunch of bodies, we're not all just going to make less money. We need to make money based on something that is more important than spend or body count."
The unnamed senior marketer quoted above said, "The more I look into programmatic, the more I look into partners, the more I see pressure on the agency model. That's going to be a storyline over time." He continued: "The old school mentality is, I've got an agency I can fire if things don't work. The new school is, I need control of the data. I don't want any risk that I'll be part of a 10-client deal. I want to be part of a one-client deal."
When they write the history of programmatic advertising, June 2014 will go down as the month when you needed two hands to count the number of big advertisers running their machine-driven media buys in-house. Procter & Gamble, American Express and Mondelez all recently joined the small club of brands embracing exchange-traded media (existing members include Kellogg's, Kimberly-Clark, Unilever, Netflix, 1-800-Flowers and Allstate Insurance). And not only have they joined; they are making large commitments. P&G reportedly aims to migrate 70% of its digital media investment to programmatic channels this year, per Advertising Age. That pledge will hit the marketplace "like a ton of bricks," said Josh Jacobs, CEO of Omnicom Group's Accuen programmatic buying unit.
Do I want to dump “agencies” completely, or do I just want a different kind of “agency” support? Is the goal to excise layers between my dollars and the end media? Or am I looking to make my programmatic media more effective and/or more strategic relative to what my current agency is doing? Is my frustration with my agencies limited to programmatic media?
How many media owners have their own in-house technology groups that are actively building products? Or groups that scour the landscape for the best that market had to offer?