One thing I pride myself on is that I always try to learn. Most Sunday nights I try my hand at cooking a dish my wife and I will have not eaten ever before. The results aren't always great (Anglesey Eggs anyone?) but sometimes surprisingly tasty. The same goes for work. I love learning about the companies I get to work with, or understanding new marketing, measurement or communications opportunities that emerge almost on a daily basis. Here are my five rules to ensure I never stop learning:

A week ago, the venerable law firm BakerHostetler announced a new hire, Ross. Ross is joining the bankruptcy department of the 100-year-old firm. Despite being new to practicing law -- BakerHostetler is Ross' first job -- Ross brings a myriad of skills to the role. In addition to reading and understanding language, Ross can also "postulate hypotheses when asked questions, research, and then generate responses (along with references and citations) to back up its conclusions." You've guessed it: Ross is the world's first artificially intelligent "lawyer," based on IBM's Watson.

When we buy in real time, we can know a lot about where the audience might be in their life at that second. This is more than just the context into which the impression will arrive. It is the context within an individual consumer's life. Is she in a hurry? Did she just visit 50 pages about autos, or is she desperately seeking directions to a restaurant? Maybe, but those are bad times to offer 20% off shampoo. In other words, "moments" are the new black.

Remember when the role of a marketer was simple? You had two things to accomplish; build a brand and drive demand. It was brand and demand - and half of those objectives were completely intangible with no real metrics to work with! I say that sentence sarcastically because I actually love accountability. That being said, marketers do have a difficult time these days because you have to find a way to prioritize and correlate the metrics at your disposal. It's not easy!

I love people-watching. I find the passing tableau of human drama endlessly fascinating. Trust me - it's worth putting the smartphone away and paying attention to what's happening around you. This past weekend, I hit the trifecta of snooping: subways, airports and shops in New York City.

My article last week, which referenced a study published by Group M, caused a minor firestorm. Joe Mandese, our "Capo di tutt'i capi" here at MediaPost, must be happy, as the label above the Online Spin reads "Controversy Served Daily." Boy, did I succeed...

For advertising revenue to increase continually over time, one or more of the following key inputs has to also increase continually: unique audience, ad exposure rate, or price - or some combination of the three. As it turns out, the desire to connect to other people through a palm-sized supercomputer is an inherently human one, and this natural accelerant is one reason WhatsApp grew from 200 to 700 million users in 21 months, and from 700 million to 1 billion in 12 months. When things go well, the natural limiter of audience growth starts to resemble the total adult population …

Technology is starting to transform marketing, starting with how enterprises talk to consumers. We have websites, ecommerce, email and mobile apps. It's so much easier for customers and marketers to proactively connect than ever before. Now that we have all of these digital touch-points and databases, marketers and their corporate information officers and finance officers are looking for models to organize and manage all of these marketing and advertising activities. And, quite naturally, they are looking for guidance to models that worked on other parts of their business. Not surprisingly, many have focused on what has worked for their supply …

There's a simple way to make advertising great again. It's called emotion. Most online advertising is targeted, which means it is efficient in media terms. A lot of online advertising is personalized, but it's personalized in what I refer to as "first-grade math" fashion, meaning it's simple and pretty much anyone can do it. We need to get more advanced -- we need to start doing some algebra and maybe some calculus. True personalization requires a more advanced level of attention, and more-complex math. True personalization requires relevance and a little bit of context -- and if you combine these …

As I mentioned in last week's column, Mediative has just released a new eyetracking study on mobile devices. And it appears that we're still conditioned to look for the number-one organic result before clicking on our preferred destination. But it appears that things might be in the process of changing. This makes sense. Searching on a mobile device is -- and should be -- significantly different from searching on a desktop. We have different intents. We are interacting with a different platform. Even the way we search is different.