"I can't tell you how many times a corporate client will say to me, 'Tell our customers how great we are.' I always reply that their customers aren't interested. 'Tell them anyway,' they say. 'TELL THEM.'" Speaking at The Project conference in Auckland, New Zealand, James Hurman, innovation consultant and author of "The Case for Creativity," was on a mission: to help us understand that client-agency interactions like that never work because they're based on the wrong question.

For years, many folks in media have questioned whether brand advertising and ROI can live together well. Awareness, a key metric of brand advertising, has for many been seen as mutually exclusive from a metric like sales attribution, a key measurement long associated with direct response.

Positioning a B2B brand in today's age of cluttered technology start-ups can be a maddening endeavor. There are endless companies out there trying to garner the attention of the same target audience, so you tend to come to a positioning already owned by someone else. To be unique, you have to understand two things. First: What doesn't work? Second, what's the right process to use to develop effective positioning?

"So, what are you doing now?" my old college friend asked, right after he'd finished swearing at me because of my early retirement. He assumed I'd be doing something related to marketing. "I'm starting a cycling tourism business," I answered. "A what...?" "Cycling tours." "Do you know anything about cycling tours?" "Not really."

It's spring, the time to clean and start anew. Perhaps you have been contemplating a new direction for your career, or perhaps you have been looking for an excuse to engage with that headhunter who called you the other day. But you're probably lacking that last little push to take that step. So let me offer you some help by sharing three things you could do that will absolutely get you fired, forcing you to take action and make that change. And none of them involve excessive use of alcohol, drugs or displays of public nudity -- so there should …

As it is no doubt for you, much of the content I consume online is surfaced by algorithms. These algorithms consider things like what I've read, what I've watched and clicked on, and who my friends are to find content they think I'll like. And because they're looking to match my existing preferences, they often provide material that reinforces what I already know or believe -- what Eli Pariser called "filter bubbles." On the one hand, this seems like a good thing: why should I waste my time with articles I'm not interested in, or videos I'm not keen to …

Advertising agencies have long used calculating their employees' time as an imperfect but acceptable way to measure effort expended, a roughly correlated proxy to value. The biggest problem I have with this practice: It means we consciously or unconsciously focus on being busy and present, rather than on the quality of our thought and the scale of our ideas -- and, above all else, the contribution we make to a business.

There are some dirty truths about fraud. I'm really starting to agree that it's beyond time that our industry addresses the topic. I latched onto viewability almost immediately when the topic was brought up, but I'll admit I didn't attach my passion to the fraud topic quite as readily, because I found it hard to believe. I now know the error of my ways.

Marketing is hard. That's because marketing reflects real life -- and real life is hard. But here's the thing: It's just going to get harder. Life is messy and squishy and filled with nasty little organic things like emotions and human beings. Personally, the thing that attracted me to marketing was its messiness.

In the past week, articles about billion-dollar transactions were flying around as if money meant nothing. For example, Comcast launched an entrepreneurial venture with $4 billion to play with. Both SC Johnson Global and L'Oreal USA put their respective media budgets up for review, each reported at $1 billion. All this makes Ello's raising a fresh $5 million dollars pale in comparison. What we should not forget, however, is that the "tiny" $5 million for Ello or the $1 billion media budget must all be managed by dedicated and steady hands.