Ad agencies are engaged in a wrenching transition, driven by technological change. The very underpinnings of the agency business are shifting, as the business confronts a variety and challenges in digital media. Digiday is embarking on a series of video interviews with agency leaders to discuss how the modern agency is built. There’s little doubt there is not an easy blueprint for the “agency of the future.” There will be new agencies, evolved “traditional agencies,” and even new hybrid marketing companies that are part agency, part tech and part media.

The series is made possible through the sponsorship of Videology, the video advertising platform until recently known as TidalTV. To introduce the series, I sat down with Videology CEO Scott Ferber to get his view on how technology is shifting the agency’s role. Ferber, who founded Advertising.com and sold it to AOL for $435 million in 2004, believes that agencies will evolve to become technology enablers, stitching together pieces of tech created by others. He’s mostly down on the idea of agencies owning technology. See the full interview below.

Read more: DIGIDAY

If content is the crux of all our marketing efforts, we should be learning, adjusting, and optimizing. If not, it will lead to a negative consumer experience.

One of my first columns for ClickZ was the importance of content and its role as a tangible media format. In the last few months, content continues to be a hot topic. The volume of content being distributed is increasing and the way an advertiser collects and uses data is changing. In our everyday professional lives, it’s easy to “set it and forget it,” but this can counter all the hard work put into content development and distribution.

So where to begin? The most common way a user will reach your content is through a basic search, meaning that search engine optimization is vital to your content planning approach. The optimization plan will need to take into account how all the content is distributed, be it via web, video, mobile, tablet, and social posts.

With media planning in its traditional sense merging with these specialized fields (search, social, mobile, experiential, and video), it’s important to make cross-channel content optimization central to any strategy. To do so (and remain sane), here are a few guidelines:

1.What are consumers already telling me? Social behavior, social trends, and search queries represent some of the best data for determining content needs and optimizations across all channels. It’s easily accessible to advertisers and beneficial when tied to syndicated and longer term research.

Example: Use data from Twitter, Facebook, or Google. The consumer is already being vocal, and as an advertiser you have access, so mine this data to improve content development and inform optimizations for existing content.

2.Is my content relevant to the experience? What is your consumer seeking? Take the research from step one and apply it to their experience, get a basic understanding of the consumer’s needs in a specific environment, and make sure your content answers their question.

Read more: ClickZ

Tremor Video’s acquisition of TubeMogul’s InPlay ad analytics tool helps both companies respectively sharpen their value to a fast-evolving video marketplace. The deal, terms of which were undisclosed, gives Tremor yet another layer of insight into publishers’ ad management programs. At the same time, TubeMogul can be seen as more fully ensconced on the demand end of the digital video ad sales equation and is no longer trying to play both sides of the fence.

Analytics is the difference: Tremor plans to integrate InPlay, which TubeMogul created about three years ago to attract more publisher business, with VideoHub, its end-to-end video ad sales platform. While VideoHub serves both ad sellers and buyers, Tremor is largely aimed at working with publishers. At a time when video ad spending remains the fastest growing category of ad spending — eMarketer said last month that video ad dollars will rise 40 percent in 2012 to $3.1 billion — the providers of video ad services are primarily differentiated by their analytics and tech stack.

Read more: TVexchanger.com

PointRoll, a Gannett Company and the leading provider of digital marketing technology, today announced the findings of its recent Video Benchmark Study and revealed a robust new set of in-stream video formats. The study conducted concluded that 78% of viewers completed 100% of interactive in-stream ads, compared to 69% who completed 100% in-stream ads without interactive elements. Additionally, interaction rates, where users specifically took an action within the ad, for in-stream video ads were more than three times higher than that of in-banner video ads.

PointRoll’s Video Benchmark Study, which compared campaign results from April–December 2011, also revealed some interesting nuances across vertical ad categories. Among those that were top performing across interactive in-stream ads were automotive, entertainment and non-profit organizations. Consumer electronics manufacturers, consumer goods manufacturers and telecommunications companies were among the top three vertical categories for in-stream video ads that did not include interactivity.

Read more: PRWeb.com

Vibrant Media, the global leader in premium contextual advertising, announces today the acquisition of Image Space Media (ISM), the in-image advertising technology company.

The deal is part of Vibrant Media’s mission under new CEO, Cella Irvine, to expand upon its existing suite of contextual solutions with innovative placements that deliver high performance for top brands, new revenue opportunities for quality publishers, and relevant experiences for consumers. With several key innovations in 2011, Vibrant Media’s contextual platform (VXPlatform) now includes a suite of advertising products – Vibrant Image, Vibrant Video, Vibrant Bar, and Vibrant Display – in addition to Vibrant In-Text.

“Traditional ad models were brought online through pre-roll and display, but we create unique media placements that are designed for the interactive nature of the internet and deliver truly relevant ad experiences to users,” says Cella Irvine, CEO of Vibrant Media. “Roughly 30% of our publishers’ content is images and they now play an important role in our strategy to deliver new media placements.”

“ISM shares Vibrant’s vision to create industry-leading in-image contextual advertising,” says Kevin Tung, Co-founder and COO of Image Space Media. “By combining our image technology with Vibrant’s unmatched scale, robust contextual platform, and incredible sales force, we’ve built a significant offering. Vibrant is a company unafraid to invent – we love everything about that.”

Read more: Vibrant Media

“Ad Agents” is a column written by the agency-side of the digital media community.

Joseph Leon, Managing Director EMEA of Essence Digital, a global, digital marketing agency based in London and New York.

In 2011, the biggest hype, the loudest buzz and the best conversation starter in digital media was without doubt RTB – (Real Time Bidding). Big words, such as revolutionary, seismic and rocket science, were bandied around and based on remarkably similar sales pitches from several leading RTB players, you’d be hard pressed not to believe that half of NASA’s scientists had jumped ship to join the digital revolution.

At its most basic, RTB is a mechanism for trading ad space in real time – sellers can essentially hold an auction for each impression and advertisers can assess, price and bid for it dynamically.

The main benefits for advertisers are indisputably cost efficiency and targeting – you pay the right price for what you need and discard what you don’t. But in practice, what does this mean for advertisers?

Read more: AdExchanger.com