Programmatic is on track to take over 2013. Google DoubleClick put together a list of 10 steps to help optimize programmatic in the new year. 

It’s no secret that peoples’ personal identifiable information floods the Internet; and, as Belgian bank Febelfin tries to illustrate in this YouTube video, the info is not only easily accessible, but easy to use maliciously. 

Is this what online consumers think of digital advertisers who use personal information from cookies and data to target? And, how can the digital advertising industry strike a balance between consumer concern and responsible, yet profitable data mining and management?

According to Gizmodo, AdAge, and others, word on the street is that Facebook will bring auto-playing video advertisements straight to your news feed. Facebook news feeds arguably offer primo real estate for advertisers. And, while stagnant display ads are far too common on the walls and feeds of Facebook users nowadays, placing dynamic (auto-playing?!) ads in-stream, alongside user-created content and interactions, may be a fairly egregious step for the social-networking giant. 

Will Facebook's impending move be a road block for native advertising? 

At Ad:Tech NYC, Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson and Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan took the stage for a wide ranging discussion on the future of digital media. The Op-Ed covered the core of that discussion in a piece last week, and also tracked down Morgan after the chat for a brief audio Q&A.

When it comes to video advertising, the time-tested approaches of Madison Avenue may be more hindrance than help in developing dynamic online campaigns, says MediaPost's Tal Chalozin.

Unlike with display, advertisers should not worry about placement – site hierarchy falls by the wayside. What's more, a digital video ad's effectiveness doesn't rely on size. While digital display advertisers vie for the largest piece of the webpage pie, video ads offer the ability to impress in a variety of dimensions, effectively allow advertisers to shrink television ads for Internet play.

When writing about native advertising, I often think of Faith No More's "Epic" – "What is it?"

Integrated media company Evolve Media, which runs vertical sites such as CraveOnline and  totallyher, introduced the INgage native advertising unit, which CEO Brian Fitzgerald calls "the 2.0 version of native advertising, marrying consumer, content, and commerce in a way that integrates the brand into a trusted site, drawing the consumer into a content-led experience that is sponsored. INgage customizes this experience to feel endemic to each site and does so at scale and without being cost-prohibitive."

Mashable's Todd Wasserman chimes in on the top digital-advertising trends of 2012. No surprise that native advertising is number one. Deals and location-based marketing saw less appeal in 2012, says Wasserman. No word on what 2013 has in store -- guaranteed programmatic, maybe? 

Via Mashable: 

Are you reading this on a mobile device? Perhaps not, but the odds are much better this year than at this point in 2011. That's because Marshall McLuhan was right: The medium has more of an influence than the content it conveys.

This year's list of top advertising trends is mostly about the shifting ways that consumers experience content and how publishers hope to harness those experiences. Some see it as a chance to reboot the digital advertising model. Others view it as a future in which publishers compete for lower and lower stakes as advertising migrates to (so far) cheaper mobile formats.

1. Native Advertising

So, just what is native advertising? The folks at Solve Media are trying to make sense of digital ad industry's latest craze. Surveying 800 media buyers, agency creatives, online publishers, venture capitalists, angel investors and more, Solve set out to examine the industry's outlook on the emerging digital ad model.

In gist, native advertising means bringing the ad experience closer to the consumer, integrating digital ads into their online user experiences. And the concept is gaining traction among advertisers, who see profit in dumping the traditional advertorial model for the native-ad experience. 

According to Solve's findings, media buyers are not wasting any time latching on to native advertising. In fact, half of media buyers polled plan to purchase native-ad inventory next year. Investors are diving into the fray as well, with more than half of those polled expecting to invest in native-advertising companies in 2013.