While attending Publicis' Monaco Media Forum this week, I was a bit taken aback when a representative of a massive global technology company, referring to the company's recent roll-out of a new product to international markets, used the acronym "EMEA" for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This, of course, to a room of EMEA'ns.

Way back in the olden days, a brand needed to establish itself digitally through the launch and management of a website, the core digital presence where a brand could engage with consumers. Shift forward to 2008, when digital brand presence expanded to include Facebook and possibly even Twitter as social media increased in importance. Now in 2010, and as we look forward to 2011, the question arises whether the requirements are increasing again to include apps, which are now morphing into their very own cross-platform opportunity.

When News Corp. put The Times of London and Sunday Times behind paywalls, everyone was fully expecting a massive hit to both publication's traffic. Now we know how bad the traffic hit was, as noted in Eric Schonfeld's "The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment." But the bigger story for advertisers is that News Corp. doesn't care, or at least not that much. Why?

Like many people -- and for mostly good reasons -- I have been drawn into the Apple way of life. And, since, despite what most fan boys will tell you, it is not a perfect situation, succumbing to this prevalence is a sickness. MacBooks do not have a long life, no matter how glorious they make your life while they are with you; data rights management, if you really think clearly about it, makes your blood boil; iPods just up and die one by one all the time. It's like pantyhose: disposable beauty.

It's been nearly four years since the city of São Paulo, Brazil, voted -- nearly unanimously -- to ban advertising in public spaces. While the U.S. advertising industry was indifferent to this far-away backlash, I thought it was intriguing. I haven't thought too much about this ban until recently, when I read a column in The New Scientist on efforts to use technology to remove corporate logos from view.

We're all looking for good ideas. Whether you're a marketer straining for that additional share point, or an agency exec looking for that next big thing for your client, or a publisher looking for the next killer platform, we're all out there searching for good ideas, which are at the core of innovation. Innovation, we're told, is the solution to all of our problems and the key to all of our opportunities: whether it's the economy or fossil fuel independence or reversing diminishing returns in our media plan or making our latest webisode "go viral." Okay, but how do we …

Many people ask what performance marketing is -- but I think it's clear that ALL marketing is performance marketing. Let's look at it from a slightly different perspective. What is "under-performance marketing"? That would be the science of spending money to talk to the wrong consumers, with utter disregard for the ROI of your spend. Sounds like a very small fraction of the marketplace to me. At best I can think of one, maybe two brands in the history of marketing that fall under this definition (and, yes -- you know who you are).

The television commercial is shrinking. Don't worry, this is not a television-bashing session. After all, it was only a couple columns ago I wrote "Why Television Is Still King." And it is. But the television commercial is still shrinking, literally. According to Nielsen, the number of 15-second television commercials is growing compared to the number of 30-second spots.

We've been talking about buying audiences -- rather than buying clicks or buying content -- for some time now. It's more than a planning concept. It's more than entry-level behavior targeting. At its best, its promise is pegged on ultra-efficiency and getting your hands on unique, advanced consumer data profiles. Further, when the process of buying audiences works out for you, you are able to engage through digital outlets to gradually understand who your best customers are (or what they look like by profile) and how to increasingly maximize the output of that relationship.