We live in exciting times. The impact of cloud computing on media distribution, the nascent emergence of Internet-connected TVs, tablets firmly established as a new connected device category, the proliferation of digital OOH, the convergence of mobile, social and the physical world with location-based services, and the ubiquity of social actions across all digital media slowly moving the term "social media" into the same coffin as "color TV" -- all are enough to bring out the inner futurist in all of us.

As we go about our business in the media marketplace, we all, once and for all, understand that the marketer's relationship with the consumer has forever changed. This relationship -- how we attract, court, engage, sustain, deepen, communicate within it -- is driven by the new powerful role that the consumer plays and will now probably never stop playing. It's a powerful role for the killer assets -- kind of like great legs and gorgeous hair -- that it possesses. These assets are demand and influence.

In Buddhism, people speak of the impermanence of existence: the fact that nothing is fixed, and that all we have are moments that arise and fall away. In "The Matrix," Neo and Morpheus stand in a blank white room, creating whatever the moment calls for -- a dojo, a city, a link to the Oracle -- as the need arises. Ethereal. Fantastical. Futuristic. And, without a doubt, the direction in which we are headed.

Wow. I wasn't sure that I'd be able to do it, but I did! I actually survived an entire week without the Internet. It was tough at times, but I wanted to see if it could be done -- and I'm living proof that with some careful planning and a little bit of patience, you too can be successful for seven full days without the Web!

Am I naïve in expecting people to want to deliver great work that exudes all their pride, experience, intellectual property, commitment and hard work? Where's the disconnect from reality? Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of great work in the industry. But let's take an inflective look at what seems to drive most of the middle-of-the-road ideas and execution in digital marketing today. <

When it comes to ethics, most of us operate quietly every day, making little judgment calls along the way that reflect our integrity. The ethical compass -- sometimes moral, if you will -- just works in the background. We know who we are; we know the kind of person we want to be -- and we just are that person. As we watch others make their way through choices of magnitude or minutiae, some of the choices seem obvious:

At a conference I attended earlier this week, Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist at NASA, spoke about the unfathomably rapid technological developments we are experiencing and will continue to experience: it won't be long, he said, before every single job can be done by a robot. He said scientists thought there were some jobs, like nursing, that required a human touch; then they tried robots in a nursing home and found out the residents liked the robots better. With total virtuality, he went on, we can obtain our entire education online; institutions like Harvard and Stanford will become nothing more than …