You've got to hand it to the folks in Cupertino. It's not been very long since Steve Jobs announced that Apple was getting into the music business, and about two weeks after its launch, the cool ads are already airing during the NBA playoffs.

"Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."

Over the past few years, we've learned to vilify risk aversion. We thought that brand managers and VPs of marketing on the client side weren't willing to risk their necks to make an investment in an unconventional medium.

It seems there has been a lot of conferences, dinners, round table discussions, leadership forums, and the like lately. Having missed a few due to the demands of new business pitches, I feel like the poster child for the sign of the times. It's tough out there. Wouldn't you agree?

As usual, the iMedia Summit (this one was at The Camelback Inn in Scottsdale) this week produced a lot of fodder for thought. One of the themes that came up very early and also often (both from the dais and in individual conversations) was that of integrated planning.

A lot of folks out there are still very hard on the creature known as Gator. In spite of settling major lawsuits and inking long-term deals with respectable properties like Overture, many persons INSIDE the industry are still clamoring for Gator to be stuffed and mounted or turned into a nice wallet-and-belt set.

This week I've been listening to a number of intelligent people whom I respect speak rather poetically about our industry and there appears to be one underlying element that I am recognizing. Our industry still has an inferiority complex.

Yesterday, Seana wrote: While this is all well and good, what do we do as advertisers? We ditch outbound email.

A startling 90 million unsolicited text messages a day are sent to subscribers. For those of us who spend our days being online marketers, this is a more than a moving, but rather a wildly waving red flag. In the recent Federal Trade Commission's spam forum, the sentiment was the realization that this truly is a problem. Now what?

Sometimes it is fun to get past the day-to-day problems and think about the future. I find that with E3 coming up, the video game business has been front and center for us. Software development in general and the Web specifically has benefited from the leading edge development that goes on in the video and PC game marketplace. On-screen games and applets that were fun to play with just a few years ago turned out to be the precursors of today's rich media like EyeBlaster.