There is not much of a question that more and more companies -- buyers, sellers and intermediaries alike -- are going to use a digital approach to TV advertising. Earlier today, NBCUniversal sales head Linda Yaccarino announced the launch of the company's own audience-targeting platform for linear TV campaigns, enabling NBC to package, sell and deliver audience-denominated campaigns based on third- and first-party data sets. For example, the company would leverage Fandango data to better target, deliver and measure movie campaigns (Comcast NBCUniversal owns Fandango).

As 2014 saw the maturation of mobile as a marketer's medium, one thing became ever more apparent to me: Mobile is not a strategy unto itself. It is a channel and should be treated as such.

First of all, let's get the pleasantries out of the way. I'm Gord. I'm new to Online Spin, but not to MediaPost. If you don't know me, I have been writing over on the Search Insider side of the house for the past 10 and a half years. Now, on to business. Just before the switch, I took online publishing to task for sacrificing its ability to communicate for the sake of advertising revenue. Among the comments posted were a few asking for guidance rather than just criticism. Fair enough. It's much easier to criticize that it is to create. …

Apart from New Year's predictions, this is also the time of the year that agency networks share their updated projections on (global) ad spend. The good news is that marketing and advertising spend continues to rise. The bad news is that if your job is in any form of printed media, you're not selling a whole lot, and you will sell even less by the end of the year. According to Zenith Optimedia, television's share of global ad spend also continues to decline, albeit at a much slower rate. Zenith predicts that the 2014 share of 39.6% will decline to …

In 2004, Patagonia published an essay titled, "Don't Buy This Shirt Unless You Need It." The following year, the company launched the Common Threads initiative, to make every piece of clothing it manufactures recyclable. In 2011, Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with the headline, "Don't buy this jacket," alongside an image of the company's R2 coat. Strange, no, for a manufacturer/retailer to encourage us away from buying its products? But Patagonia's reasoning was simple and compelling: We have too much stuff already, and when we buy stuff we don't need, we waste money, destroy …

Okay, great -- you clicked or opened the article. You can leave now. The ad impression was counted. You staying and reading the rest of this post doesn't earn its publisher any more ad revenue. In fact, it would be better if you left and clicked on something else, so you could generate another impression. Seriously, what are you still doing here? Joking aside, if you are actually still reading, the above is the problem we face when we set the lowest possible standards for "impressions" of both display and video.

I'm at CES this week. Digital used to be in the shadows at CES, along with SXSW, Cannes, and a number of other large-scale, mainstream conferences, but now digital runs the discussion. Data is at the core, along with automation, enterprise-scale solutions, and "the cloud." Analytics have come a long way and this year will venture even further.

On vacation in Cape Town, my family and I would often place all our phones on a pile in the middle of the table when we visited a restaurant. I dubbed this "The Stack."

It is customary in most companies to perform a year-end evaluation of the people that work for them, as well as for the people they work with (like agencies and other marketing partners). In this age of big data -- and because I have been writing here for a full year -- I have decided to use the data that Mediapost shares for each post as my performance evaluation as delivered by you. And I am sharing them in full disclosure, as you do with a 360 performance review.