Do the math in media-buying terms, and clinical trial studies likely have one of the highest effective CPMs in the media business: $8 billion divided by 1 million successful trial participants = $8,000 per person or an $8 million effective CPM.

Thanks to a good friend who develops high-speed trading systems for Wall Street, I was a little ahead of the curve on the implications for blockchain trading on Madison Avenue. But I still don't get the push to float new cryptocurrencies to enable it, especially, when the old-fashioned one -- money -- still works fine.

An influential Wall Street analyst this morning predicts the industry's dominant players will report strong second-quarter results this week, but warns that digital's incremental advertising boon may be poised to stall. "There are many reasons to look at digital advertising through a negative lens at the present time," Pivotal Research Group's Brian Wieser writes in a note sent to investors this morning. "Digital advertising has had many problematic elements placed in the spotlight over the past few years (i.e. measurement, attribution problems, potential consumer toxicity, brand safety issues, market dominance by two companies, etc.), and many marketers are only now …

Real-time marketing can be incredibly effective, but it doesn't come without its costs. Turns out, one of them is, well, time. A new report being released today by the CMO Council and IBM Watson finds that most organizations don't have enough time to manage the consumer data they have access to: first-, second- or third-party.

In what likely is the biggest consumer data play by any agency holding company since Dentsu Aegis Network's $1.5 billion acquisition of Merkle, Interpublic is expected to announce a deal to acquire the Marketing Solutions Business of big data firm Acxiom. The deal, reportedly valued at more than $2 billion, would be Interpublic's biggest and most significant acquisition since Michael Roth took over as CEO in 2005.