I have been reading an industry book that I found by accident, at a library book fair event. One of its chapters is devoted to measurement. Let me share some of its observations on this very topical subject:

We've known each other for a while now, you and I -- since 2007, by my reckoning. So I think it's time to start being, you know, a bit more real with each other. Maybe tell each other some things about ourselves we're not so proud of. I'll start.

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase "the medium is the message" to suggest that the medium in which a message or communication is delivered many times influences or overshadows the message itself. Thus, the fact that a politician's speech is broadcast on television has a bigger impact on how an audience receives it than the message of the speech itself. I think that if McLuhan were to look at the digitizing and transforming advertising media business today, he would say that the measurement is the medium.

I recently wrote about how silly it is to embed a team of digitally focused folks in your marketing department, call it a team and expect results. The response was overwhelming to that article, which shocked me because I thought that idea was taken for granted. Well, if that topic resonated, let's take the thinking a few steps further. I could also argue that in today's customer-centric marketing environment, marketing can no longer be a stand-alone department, but needs to be integrated into every facet of the organization based on three lynchpins: audience, data and revenue.

No matter what audience you are trying to reach next Sunday, the Sunday after, and every Sunday between now and Christmas, those people ARE on social and they ARE cheering for their favorite team. Bottom line: If you're serving mobile targeted social ads on game day that don't take the context of the game day experience into account, or if you're not targeting ads on social at all, your competition will be eating your lunch this season.

Much has been made over the last 12 months about the rise and rise of programmatic advertising: Its shady practices are scamming advertisers out of money, its algorithms will eat media buyers' and sellers' jobs, it will save and/or kill print and digital media, it is the smart marketer's best friend or possibly worst enemy, it is the only part of media agencies making money.

I wouldn't have thought there would be much controversy over the push to make ads viewable. We should want people -- real people, and the people relevant to the message -- to see ads. Right? Apparently not, according to an article in The Information this week (it's behind their paywall, but I highly recommend subscribing for some of the best analysis of the tech industry out there). The piece by Tom Dotan, "Controversy Rages Over How to Combat Phantom Ads," points out that many people in the ad industry are concerned that the MRC's new-ish guidelines on what constitutes "viewability" …

I confess an addiction. Perhaps you share it with me -- many people do. I am obsessed with the Internet. It's not just Facebook, although Facebook is certainly a big part of the problem. After all, you need to know if someone has liked your status in the past 30 seconds, or commented on your new profile picture, or posted a link to "10 Hilarious Chairs That Think They're People."

"It's the most wonderful time of the year." That line from a popular holiday song is actually just as applicable in September as it is in December. Why? Because September through October represents possibly the greatest single stretch of the year for the media world!

A month ago, Procter & Gamble announced it would be culling about 90 to 100 of its brands globally, in a restructure that would instead focus on the company's top 70-80 brands. On the surface, the move makes complete sense. After all, the remaining brands have accounted for 90% of sales and 95% of profit over the past three years. So if I read that correctly (and the math is rather simple), we're talking about 90-100 brands responsible for 10% of sales and only 5% of profit. If that's the case, one might ask what on earth the company was …