Digital readers may not be familiar with it, but one of the most important metrics stories of 2012 thus far took place last week, when Canoe Ventures -- the joint project of cable providers Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems, Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable -- announced an enormous pivot. The project had been created to provide addressable TV advertising across 100 million U.S. cable households. As of last week, Canoe has abandoned that founding mission, setting its sights on interactive advertising within video-on-demand and TV Everywhere instead.

Websites today are jam-packed with content, actions, and tactics to get you to engage and transact. Is it working? Well, the only way to truly know is to track it, and there is a lot to track! Websites can easily average over 10,000 pages with multiple actions on each page. Tracking this amount of data requires complex implementations, massive data storage, and sophisticated data visualization to make sense of it all; and in the end, it may be impossible. Even with the help of web analytics software such as Omniture and Google Analytics, the amount of data is still dense …

As media and communication vehicles proliferate and old measurement constructs are rendered increasingly inadequate, we must diversify how and with which techniques we gather and interpret consumer insights. Many readers will say that the opening sentence is simply a regurgitation of ideas that have "separated the men from the boys" for years. Others may wonder if this column will be a call to dismantle quantitative measurement as we know it. Frankly, it is neither. It is an announcement about a unique partnership between IAB and Ipsos OTX to learn together about how consumers in the digital age talk to each …

He's Lintastic. He has New York City going Linmanic. Jeremy Lin is a Harvard-groomed point guard, and two weeks ago he schooled Kobe Bryant. He's exciting, unpredictable, and the ultimate example of how sports and data intersect. As such, the New York Knicks rookie point guard has a few lessons to teach the digital marketing business.

I remember the day I bought my first smartphone -- the IBM Simon -- which was so long ago that it was actually called a "personal digital assistant." I excitedly opened the package, charged it up, started reading through the manual on all the intriguing features -- and then my head started to spin. I started slow and eventually learned the ropes of my new machine. I never imagined I would use a phone to do all these other things -- but fast-forward to today when, like most of you, I've become a smartphone "power-user." Just as smartphones were in …

For online marketers, the practice of global optimization involves making small changes to the volumes of impressions served on all, or almost all, ad placements with the goal of maximizing a target metric, such as gross profit or number of conversions. Online marketers typically haven't performed such tests at a macro level of optimization because they are difficult to design and properly administer. However, there are two good ways any online marketer can set up a global optimization test.