Digital News Daily Editor Tobi Elkin wrote an article earlier this week asking if anything has changed in the marketing/ad world since the release of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA)'s Media Transparency Report about a year ago. She quotes from three ad-tech company players, whose reactions can be be summarized as: "Not too much has changed, and marketers should do more to retake control of their ad dollars in digital LaLaLand." While I agree that marketers probably could do more, I take issue with the tone of this and other industry reactions to the one-year anniversary that not much …

As an industry, we need to focus on the voices of the people who have the most leverage, who have the budgets and who are responsible for creating brand engagement with the consumer. These are the folks whose opinions matter the most, but unfortunately these are the people who speak and write the least in industry forums. How do you get these people to drive the conversation in the most appropriate direction?

So, here's the question: Could Sears -- the retail giant that has become the poster child for the death of mall-based retail shopping -- have saved itself? This is an important question, because I don't think Sears' downward trend is an isolated incident.

I have been straddling the European and North American continents for most of my professional and personal life, and I have always had the benefit of exposure to both. Let's not forget: the U.S. has had advertising in general, including commercial TV advertising, far longer than most other nations on the planet. In fact, the U.S. has never NOT had commercial TV - it always was commercial. Most of Europe has had commercial TV since the 1960s to late 1980s (in The Netherlands and parts of former Soviet Eastern Europe, for instance). That's right. What you consider to be "normal" …

An op-ed headline in The Washington Post this week intrigued me: "Our town's newspaper was mocked for endorsing Trump. Here's what we think now." The column was from Gary Abernathy, publisher and editor of the Hillsboro, Ohio Times-Gazette. It was accompanied by a photo of an idyllic rural scene: a field of soybeans, a combine harvester, a setting sun.

I'm writing this from Europe. I started the week at TV Rise 2017 in San Sebastian, Spain, where top addressable TV experts from companies like WPP's Group M, RTL, ProSieben, Ericsson, A&E Networks and Iponweb convened to share experiences. Today and tomorrow, I'm in Stockholm, speaking at egta's CEO Summit, where the commercial leaders of Europe's largest TV and radio companies are talking about how they are managing digital-born change. It's back to the future for me in a way. The last time I talked advanced TV advertising in Europe was in the late 1990s as CEO of Real Media, …

I've suddenly found myself listening to podcasts almost daily. Some are related to the news and current events, while others are hobby-centric or purely entertainment. Podcasts are called out everywhere and have become a viable channel once again, spoken of in the same breath as video. When did all this happen - and do advertisers feel the same way?

There's an interesting new study that was just published about how our brain mathematically handles online reviews that I wanted to talk about today. But before I get to that, I wanted to talk about foraging a bit.

Attentive readers will have noticed that today's column has a new name, and I guess we must talk about that first. We are now known as "Media Insider" versus our old name of "Online Spin." I think changing the name of a column is a minor event in the grand scheme of things. But the fact that we're dropping something called "Online" in the name of a column and replacing it with the word "Media" tells us a lot about the state and direction of the advertising and media industry.

Of all the art forms, few have the power to stir strong emotions as music. And few have had such an easy and fruitful relationship with advertising.