The media industry has lost the plot to its own novel. Case in tipping point: Laura Desmond, a top executive at a media ad agency, accepted a personal payment of stock options from a media sales organization that her agency does business with. This "Pete Rose betting on baseball" kind of conflict of interest is shocking enough to spark major reform. Instead, it was barely a blip in the news coverage of our industry.

I read an article recently suggesting that if you had a direct sales team selling the advertising on your site, then you should not use programmatic ad tools -- and that the companies providing these tools say publishers should use them to replace their direct sales team. This does not make any sense to me.