The majority of my career has been dedicated to marketing small and midsized interactive businesses. This has been the result of my passion for working with promising, early-stage startups and seeing them through their first years of rapid growth. Yet, while I've been tactically focused on marketing smaller companies, I've always been precisely tuned to the marketing challenges of large companies. But my perspective changed over the past year after joining my latest startup. My strategic and intellectual focus now is centered squarely on the issues of smaller advertisers. What have I learned? "Small to medium" is actually huge.

Yesterday morning, I was the opening speaker at a conference in Mexico City for traditional ad agencies co-hosted by AMAP (the 4As of Mexico) and Mexico IAB. The conference title was "Don't Bite Your Tail," a reference that for agencies to continue to avoid digital today (as many in Mexico do) was tantamount to a dog biting its tail. My keynote focused on why embracing digital was so important today, especially given the emerging economic crisis. While my talk was developed with a Mexican ad agency audience in mind, I think that it makes sense to summarize it in my …

A few years back, I had the opportunity to focus my attention and efforts on the mobile category. I hesitated, because I felt mobile was a bit too far off from becoming a mature medium. The running joke for the last five to seven years has been that mobile was always "three years away from becoming a viable stand-alone medium." That was the case up until recently. I think mobile just had its growth spurt!

Here is a statement that's not hard to make: I couldn't possibly disagree with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In a piece last week, Nat Ives quoted Schmidt saying, "Brands are the solution, not the problem.... Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." What Schmidt is saying is that brands can play a major role in improving the content of the Internet by supporting quality content. My question is, what is Google doing to help?

How should we organize for digital marketing? I sometimes wonder how straight a question that really is. Recently, I was asked to help a friend consult with a CPG company that wanted to know this very thing. The client was very focused on models to follow, predictive trends, and -- truth be told -- a crystal-clear, single prevailing schema on how to organize around the Web site and all inbound digital marketing. Company strategists had commissioned reams of consultants before us to survey, benchmark, analyze, align enterprise interests -- and were no further along than when started.

We used to live in a world where few people produced content and most people consumed it. Thanks to the Web, nearly every digitally connected person creates some sort of content, and nobody can consume it all. This has enabled a new phenomenon of content contribution that's changing the world: crowdsourcing. According to Wikipedia -- a prime example, itself -- "crowdsourcing is a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call." It's all about user contributions, and it's proliferated with the explosion …

Earlier this week, I received a particularly heart-warming email.

Waving the flag of brand-building in an accountable marketplace is akin to saying "you have no idea what you're doing." Building a brand is not the end goal of your marketing, so don't pretend that is how you are spending your money when you can track far beyond that goal.

It is easy to ignore the role marketing plays in shaping nations. Marketing not only affects what people consume, but what is produced. Marketing, like it or not, shapes our political process. Marketing guides people's selection of politicians, and then impacts the way politicians govern once in office. The truth, is marketing can be more impactful than any legislation. Just look at how the financial markets react to a change in consumer confidence. The brand of our government, the brand of our economy and the brand of the United States itself, has taken a beating in recently. What role can, …

As marketing, media and creative professionals, we often examine our relationships with the "A word" -- that is, awards. How much do awards matter to us? Should we have an active submission plan? How much should we collaborate with our clients on seeking awards? I'm not sure how many schools of thought there are on this, but there are definitely more than one.