Imagine if - based solely on what the camera on the screen you're looking at sees in your face - the first sentence of a story like this is different for you than it is for that frowning non-Millennial male in the corner office. Although our smartphones, PCs and TVs can't yet read our genders, ages and emotions to deliver targeted content, that time is already here, as you know if you happened by the Samsung booth at the National Retail Federation's BIG Show in Manhattan earlier this year.

This story begins with Frank Zazza asking if I want a lift. Normally, that might not seem like an unusual offer, but seeing as we're stepping out of the New York Athletic Club in the middle of a busy workday onto Central Park South, I'm thinking it's probably easier for me to grab a cab, or even walk, vs. the hassle of retrieving his car from a garage nearby?

In my last post here, I exploited one of my go-to column idea generators -- a Google News index -- to analyze how the news media have been playing the theme of "content marketing." This week, I'm exploiting another one: my own inbox.

Whenever I'm stuck for a column idea, you know, "content," one of my favorite devices is to type some keywords into Google News to see how "news media" are playing it. When I typed in "content marketing," the first thing I found was that the news media is playing it quite a bit: about 768,000 results on Google News' index. The second thing I noticed is that it's not actually all news media that's being indexed. A fair amount of it, ironically, is nothing more than content marketing.