Last week there was an important conference called the On Demand Summit 3.0. Now, I'm not a big fan of the use of the word "summit" -- unless there's a meeting between world leaders to sign treaties. I mean, this is still television. But there were big issues discussed, including the industry's view of the on-demand advertising opportunity.

This week the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) announced the results of a feasibility study for the Trackable Asset Cross-Platform Identification (TAXI) project. This study, in partnership with the ANA, 4A's and the IAB is a first step in implementing open and interoperable industry standard codes for content and ads across all content. I sat down with CIMM's Managing Director, Jane Clarke to talk about TAXI and other CIMM initiatives.

I hail from a long line of entrepreneurs. If we haven't always read the crystal ball correctly, it hasn't been for lack of trying. A hundred years ago, my great-grandfather Max Helfstein owned the biggest stable of hacks in New York City -- you know, the horses that pulled taxis and delivery trucks all over the city. A colleague of his arrived one day in 1915 with what he claimed was the latest and greatest new invention, one he said would revolutionize the transportation industry: the automobile. Skeptical, Gramps took the thing out for a spin, and promptly crashed it …

Talk about getting in under the wire! With only five weeks to go before the end of the traditional broadcast television season -- a season that left the broadcasters without a single new hit and only a handful of modest freshman successes -- NBC served up "The Voice," a new reality competition series that is shaping up to be the network's first new significant success in years.

The advent of the DVR (The PVR and DVR) is credited not only with increasing the ways a viewer can access and view content. It has also spawned new measurement metrics that are based on when a piece of content is viewed, whether the playback occurs within the same broadcast day as the live airing, a day later, a week later and up to as much as two weeks later. What is the optimum and fairest playback length of time for a rating? That is still under discussion, but the industry standard of the acceptable outlying time frame is playback …

Great marketing is honest communication, but it also involves sleight of hand. The Gretskys of marketing, the Great Ones, always know the goal and always achieve the sale, no matter the medium. But they never "sell." The sleight of hand occurs because they understand their audience and their brand so well, that prospects are convinced to buy. They want to buy. It's their choice to buy.

TV is, once again, coming into what looks to be a robust upfront market. This is obviously good for national programmers directly, and indirectly good for many others across the TV eco-system. However, a consistent theme from national programmers over the last few months has been over "viewing of my quality programming on other devices." This new and incremental viewing is not the problem as much as the non-counting of that viewing that creates the disconnect.

Last week's revelation by Nielsen that the total number of television households had dropped rocked the industry, and rightfully so. It also prompted me to wonder what a television household is these days anyway.

It seems every day brings a new development in the recent revolving door of daytime TV anchors. While the current landscape resembles a "Wheel of Fortune" episode, one thing we know for sure is that it will mean further erosion of the broadcast networks' stranglehold on daytime TV, leaving the media industry to debate, "Where will viewers go?"

Will the broadcasters take any cues from USA Network's terrific upfront presentation earlier this week? Simultaneously amped up and stripped down, it was a refreshingly straightforward showcase for the network's programming, devoid of all those lectures and data clutter that typically bog down such events.