For mobile advertising to succeed as a viable opportunity for advertisers, mobile needs to learn to value its own inventory better than it currently does -- and convey the perception of that value to marketers.

An insightful friend described a growing challenge with insights in the marketing services industry. He suggested I probe the issue, so here goes...

January is a popular time to get a new job in advertising, especially for salespeople whose Q4 bonuses and commissions have been paid out. But how do you find the sales job of your dreams? For some answers, I spoke to Ellie Windle, sales director at MediaMath and former executive recruiter at Urgent Career.

Over the holiday, I spent a week in the Blue Mountains of Australia. A dear friend who lives there took us crystal hunting in a disused quarry. He is an experienced gemologist and has a house full of beautiful pieces. So I expected the excursion to be kind of like a trip to Tiffany's: waltz into the quarry, look around, pick up a few gemstones, saunter to a nearby caf for a latte. Instead, it involved mallets and crowbars, hammers and pickaxes, and searching for a needle of crystal in a boulder-strewn haystack the size of several football fields under …

For folks trying to understand consumers and marketing and the future of electronics and technology, Las Vegas and the mammoth CES took center stage this week, just as in years past. Everyone wants to know (at least, according to the pundits) about the next smartphones, tablets, connected TV's, 4K TVs (Four times more pixelization), handheld gaming devices, music players, smart forks, cars that drive themselves, programmable drones and 3D printers that can output everything from car parts to animal organs.

If I were a betting man -- and once upon a time, I was -- I would bet big on Apple this year. The way I see it, if company strategists live up to their own expectations, they could revolutionize advertising (not just the TV) in 2013. This would happen if Apple television launched.

The question of whether brands should manage social media in-house or externally may be the wrong question. The core question is: How should marketing leaders harness social media as it becomes more strategic and connected to business performance?

With student debt now topping $1 trillion dollars and the cost of college far outpacing inflation, some have begun to question if getting a college education is worth it. Industries like media and advertising tend to rely on a lot of on-the-job training, and client entertaining and negotiating isn't something most schools teach. To get a reality check, I asked Nick Johnson, senior vice president, national sales, for NBC Sports Digital at NBCUniversal, for his view.

A lot has been said about the need to embrace failure as a natural and healthy part of business life (and personal life). In the world of David (startups) and Goliath (corporations), there's no question who has the edge in terms of adopting and integrating failure into operations. "Fail fast" has become part of the startup vernacular, thanks to Lean Startup and Lean Startup Machine philosophy, pivoting around "pivoting." In truth, this shouldn't be a shock to sluggish corporations, who have long practiced the dark arts of direct marketing or at the very minimum, "Test, learn, evolve." How is it …

The day after New Year's is traditionally a chance to start anew. It's the first "real" day of the year, when everyone is back at work, your to-do list is newly inked and your resolutions have been made. This year I decided not to make a big list of things to accomplish. Instead, I decided to focus my efforts on one thing: to be "good."