In my typical frenetic Friday hoop-jumping I stopped in my tracks. Within a matter of a few minutes I had 32 email alerts and feeds announcing Google's biggest acquisition to date -- a whopping $3.1 billion dollars for none other than DoubleClick. Google's been trying to get into the display ad space. So think about it, now Google has access to reams of ad campaign data and instant tenured relationships with advertisers and Web publishers at large.

Who cares what you think! How good is customer experience in the eyes of your customers? Julie Katz of Forrester Research this week reported on new research from fellow analyst Cindy Commander that sought to answer this very question. She suggested that "80% of companies believe they're delivering superior experiences to their customers, but only 8% of customers agree."

I was fortunate to hear an extraordinary talk last night at the Interactive Advertising Bureau board dinner by David Kenney, the CEO of Digitas. He spoke about the challenges that online advertising faces. His message was simple, engaging and, in the end, a clear call to action.

Our industry is not slowing down, and one way to stay ahead of the pack and maintain an advantage is to identify the trends behind what's happening and anticipate where they'll take you. I find this the most interesting part of what I do every day. To that end, I wanted to share with you what I've identified as some of the more interesting trends shaping the marketplace.

Prediction markets fascinate me. Who can argue with the idea of creating markets for ideas? The basic premise of predictions markets is to aggregate the opinions of "the many" in a competitive and efficient manner, most commonly representing a stock market. While I definitely want to dedicate an entire Spin to actual advertising prediction markets, for today I want to look at the ideas whose stock should be soaring.

Last week I was taking to someone who is new to online advertising and marketing. She was fluent in print advertising in both newspapers and magazines. I was explaining the difference between print lead times and online lead times for "close" dates. I think she was pleasantly surprised that with online advertising we need about five days to traffic and test creative versus sometimes months of time in print. What we didn't talk about was the shelf life of some online environments. Depending on your business objectives, media plan, creative on hand et al, this could be bad or good.

In case you've been under a rock, a new star was born. His name is Sanjaya. Who? Sanjaya Malakar, the less-than-stellar "American Idol" contestant who can't seem to get eliminated from the reality-television singing competition -- and whose daily buzz levels even exceeded Britney's. As someone who works in market research, I'm fascinated by pop-culture storms such as this, and especially when passionate voting and metrics play a huge role.

Newspapers have been in the news lately, with this week's announcement of Sam Zell's highly leveraged effort to buy the Tribune Company just one of a number of a number of "big" recent stories about the industry and the future path of newspaper publishing companies. So, with that as a backdrop, I ask you, "Which major newspaper will be first?" No. I don't mean which major metropolitan U.S. newspaper will be the first to collapse under its own weight and shut down. In this case, I am focused on something more positive. I want to know which major newspaper will …

Once in a while I come across brilliance, and this week I came across Webkinz. The trend in social networking is to create and develop niche networks that reach a specific audience and encourage interaction. Webkinz is a social network tied to a toy company that targets young children and places them in a virtual world that is safe, exclusive, and appears to be a lot of fun!

How many ad units are you exposed to on any given Web page -- banner, page sponsor ads at the right and bottom, center box etc.? Flashing banner ads, rope the bull, score the winning basket, win an iPod, fake system error messages, shocking ad copy -- anything to induce a click. On television noise can be literal volume. Ever watch a program loud to begin with, then the commercials come on and they are so loud the whole room looks for the remote to turn down the volume? Heard of towns recently voting to restrict outdoor advertising as it …