This article is not about the frontiers of media and marketing. It happens to be about a new book, published this week, titled "Bedfellows." You and I together can participate in the grand experiment. This is an exciting time, and now you can have a proprietary stake in a (middlebrow) literary event. You're online now. You've got the links. Check it out.

Averages can mislead. When analyzing social-sentiment data, the friendly tweet can steer you wrong, but beware even more of the simple mean.

At a time when brands have less ability to efficiently reach masses of consumers with advertising messages, and thus desperately experiment online and especially in social media to cultivate ongoing relationships, maybe what's missing is the campaign trail. Why aren't brands doing more to meet the consumer? Or, more to the point, to enable the consumer to meet them?

As trust assumes an ever larger influence on purchasing decisions, brands as never before can build a following so devoted that customers will throw the competition's unused product in the trash. But in today's environment of mega-transparency and social chatter, those same brands pay a huge penalty for straying from the values that engendered such trust.

This week 'USA Today' celebrates its 30th anniversary -- and I was there on Day One. I was the advertising and marketing columnist and in the debut edition had 700 words on the official sponsorships being sold for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, at that point scheduled for two years hence.

Komen was a Relationship Era marketer before there was a Relationship Era. Now, as a penalty for betraying those relationships, Komen must resort to paid advertising to manipulate public opinion back to where it once organically was.

At exactly the same moment Obama was seducing 69.5 million voters, another iconic figure was -- out of all common sense and experience -- capturing my own heart. I refer, of course, to Flo -- the Progressive insurance lady.

This horror story, shocking though it is, began with a simple question: All else being equal, would expensively produced video ads fare better or worse online than unbranded user-generated videos harvested from the Internet and simply shared by brands? And then it took a ghastly turn into the shadowy world of online video seeding.

What a fantastic idea -- to spend a couple of million dollars to send the hottest babe ever into outer space to extinguish a star threatening to destroy Earth. Congratulations for racking up almost 5 million YouTube views in only three months. But please return it to our decade, where it belongs.

One of the joys of discovery is that it's recyclable. The most popular archeological destination in Mexico is one of the two previously noted works of man I became acquainted with on a visit to Mexico City. The other, somewhat more modest in scope, was a 2011 campaign honoring the 15th anniversary of Hotmail.