As attendees to the Smart TV Summit in San Jose last week learned, it is estimated that by the end of 2015 there will be 350 million computer-driven, Internet-connected televisions in the world. Even if these estimates are off by 20%, it will still be an enormous number and will likely have extraordinary impact on the media and marketing industry. Today, for fun, I have created my list of the Top 10 consequences of there being 350 million connected TVs in the world in 2015. Here they are:

User-generated content gets a bad rap. At its inception online, UGC was immediately categorized as low-quality video content, and brands were a bit hesitant to dive in and sponsor them (at the time, rightfully so). Still, in the last three to four years, the hesitation has subsided and marketers are truly on board. UGC is growing up!

The digital marketing industry has insidiously trained itself to believe in marketing stories painted through the lens of proxy metrics. To a degree this is no different than any other medium. On the other hand, our digital world is rife with metrics and reports and it's easy to be overwhelmed and miss the forest for the trees. You can wallpaper your entire office with some online advertising reports. Impressions, reach, frequency, clicks, engagement, brand measures -- and for direct marketers, even conversions and revenue -- don't tell the story of how an investment performed against actual business objectives.

Last week at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Innovation Days and "The Future of Display," CEO Randall Rothenberg called for greater hands-on collaboration between strategy, creative and media -- and thanked big brands for leading the way.

Rumor has it that Jesse Schell regrets ever having coined the term "gamification." It's not hard to see why. Gamification is everywhere. Trying to drive traffic to your website? Add points and badges! Want to make your loyalty program more compelling? Add a leaderboard! The lingo for efforts like these is "chocolate-covered broccoli" -- an attempt to make boring things interesting by slapping some game-type characteristics on them. And the reason it doesn't work is that it completely misses the point of games. <

As you may have read, Facebook has integrated facial recognition technology into its photo-tagging feature. The technology "suggests" friends' names for photos as you upload them when it recognizes similar facial features from photos you have previously tagged. The availability of this feature -- and the fact that it is turned on by default in the U.S. -- has created quite a stir this week among privacy advocates. I, however, don't think that this issue has much to do with privacy. No, the ability to recognize someone's photo is all about publicness, and one's control over someone else's identity, but …

How many friends do you have? That question takes on new meaning in today's hyper-connected, social media-enabled world. It's a question I dealt with a bunch over the last couple of weeks while I was "cleaning up" my social graph (of course, by "cleaning up," I mean deleting people from my Facebook feed).

Most people don't realize that I started my career in the music industry. I learned many valuable lessons about business back then, but the one lesson that has best stood up to the test of time was a line that was repeated over and over again by one of the old-timer music industry execs: music (content) is a currency. Today content is a much more valuable currency than ever before, and if you haven't ingrained this fundamental principle into your DNA yet, you'd better wake up and get moving.

One of the things we have continued to note over recent years, even amid the industry happy-dance over the ever-more-diverse mix available, has been the continued prevalence of email. Yes, it's true. Email -- and for that matter, paid search -- has remained high on the totem pole, largely we assume for its trusty performance on direct response and ROI.

We need to have a talk, marketer to marketer -- and, Google, I'll need you to step out of the room for a minute. We've got a problem here. Google has trained an entire generation of us to believe that the only cost structure that is at all fair is cost-per-click, cost-per-acquisition, cost-per-action, or some variation thereof.