Does your agency focus its attention on tactics, rather than strategy? Many people talk about the agency model being "broken," and the primary reason is that most agencies are compensated by their clients based on tactics, not strategy. When you compensate your agency partners for the tactical side of the business (the media plans and the banners or websites they create) rather than the strategic side of the business, you get what you pay for.

I'm a TED addict (that's the nonprofit whose theme is "ideas worth spreading"), and this week Joanna Blakley landed in my inbox to talk about fashion's free culture and what we could learn from it. In the fashion industry, she argues, there is very little copyright protection, which forces a huge amount of innovation. In addition, the demographic for knockoffs was never the same as the demographic for the original anyway, so who cares if someone is paying $2 for a fake Louis Vuitton clutch purse on the streets of Manhattan?

This week's column simply celebrates a single thought I heard at the very end of the week that instantly resonated. From the point of view of one super-duper global honcho: "We are supremely client-facing, with zero self-awareness."

Formerly, live technology demos would require a consensual gathering around a laptop, or a computer monitor mounted on a desk, or a trade-show booth. But thanks to the iPad, which launched in April, a new, nonconsensual form of demonstration and pitching has emerged. These nonconsensual demonstrations have become especially prevalent at Internet conferences and expositions. It's now impossible to attend one without getting a demo jammed in your face.

One hundred billion dollars and $150 billion; those are the global numbers that Magna Global's Brian Wieser projected this week will be spent annually on online and TV advertising respectively in five years. That's a lot of money, and represents strong growth for both sectors. Like most of you, the projections beg a critical question: who will benefit from that increased spend? Will it be ad agencies? Content creators? Media distributors? Internet and search giants? Consultancies? All of them? None of them? While I am not ready to opine on which of those industry categories will win or lose, I …

If you read that header and it reminded you a little bit of the infamous Allen Iverson rant from years past (when the basketball player went off on the word "practice"), then I did my job as a writer. If you read that line and thought I was going to go on a mild tirade about a somewhat frustrating topic, you might also be a little bit correct.

Shifts in how people consume music, entertainment and news are undermining traditional media business models that currently support the cost of making great content. The irony is that by embracing and taking advantage of the new media landscape that threatens their survival, media companies can not only survive, but actually thrive.

Has it dawned on you that the long-hailed total accountability of digital, while never really 100% true, has also never even yielded to anything approaching meaningful transparency? Whenever I hear "experts" talk about accountability, I wonder if they've ever read a campaign report, let alone executed a buy on a network.

Earlier this week I taught the inaugural session of Online Marketing School. It's a new crash course in marketing organized by nextNY, a social network for young people who have a stake in the future of tech and new media in New York City. Since this was the introductory session, I focused on 11 fundamental marketing principles I've picked up in the past three start-ups I've been involved with, as well as my current one. I avoided specific marketing tactics because they're a dime a dozen. Instead, I sought to share my own unique perspectives, which you probably won't find …

A lot of media companies today are trying to build or grow new fee-related businesses. For example, The New York Times Company has announced that NYTimes.com is going behind a metered pay wall next year. In a perfect world, all of these efforts will be successful. Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world. Most -- or probably a large number -- of these new subscription- or fee-based efforts will fail. Here are some reasons why: