There has been much discussion of emotions in advertising. The advertising and market research industries have come a long way in gaining a better, more scientific, and more measurable understanding of emotion. Neuroscience has been instrumental to this effort. There is now a basic understanding that asking people to describe their emotions and how they feel about an ad or a brand may yield a scatter plot of results that provide no direction to the brand. Still, it's critical to talk to your consumer, to hear their voice. When more is needed, neuroscience can provide the missing insights and direction …

Let me guess. As a man's man, you proudly take on any task that's thrown at you and absolutely nail it, without asking for help. And us guys don't like asking for help. In fact, we'd rather get lost finding our own way than listening to a GPS or by following a map. To keep up with making our lives a little easier, mobile apps are emerging that promote that stubbornness and encourage us to be a true man's man.

According to a new survey, men are drinking less beer.

We're not the first to say it, but it bears repeating. The current content marketing business - driven by blogs, podcasts (audio and video), social media content, infographics, native ads, etc. - is extremely similar to the heyday of magazines. A blog can target a specific vertical audience, including the elusive male demographic, in fact. Certainly, there are many male-specific content destinations (for the sake of this conversation, we'll just put the discussion of adult-oriented content to the side completely), but one of the best executed that we've seen is the blog The Art of Manliness.

In honor of the Independence Day holiday weekend, I'd like to share with you something I recently learned about this great country of ours: There is not a universal consensus about what the most patriotic movie of all time is.

On Oct. 6, 1845, when the first organized baseball game was played in Hoboken, N.J., (the game was three innings, and the final score was 11-8), no one envisioned the multibillion-dollar sports rights deals that are common place now. For reference, NBC paid $1.2 billion for U.S. broadcast rights to last year's London Olympics.

One of my favorite "Portlandia" sketches last season showed the "Dream of the '90s" being alive in Portland. That sketch wasn't about the 1990s, however; it was about the 1890s and featured hipsters with foot-long beards and wool vests, hand-hammering their ice from a block. There may have even been a monocle. While they clearly were mocking one pocket of Portland's diverse crowd, there absolutely is an emerging trend whereby men take their style cues from previous generations, as reported in our study, The Acumen Report (44% of men looked to prior generations for inspiration on style). Marketers and brands …

Last week I discovered this beauty: a print ad that recharges your cellphone. It's a magazine tip-in, with a solar panel and a USB port, produced by Nivea skin care and DraftFCB in support of a communication objective: "You never have to leave the beach," i.e. even to charge your phone. The ad is a brilliant use of cutting-edge technology that provides real nontrivial value to consumers. Wow! Even without the copious Brazilian bikini model eye candy, this is serious moment of fave stuff.

Way, way back in the early 1990s, there was a brief period of time when the most popular player in the NBA - okay, besides Michael Jordan - wore a flower-print housedress and a pillbox hat, and answered to the name "Grandmama." Believe it or not, I'm not referring to Dennis Rodman. Grandmama was actually the alter ego of Larry Johnson, a (relatively) short power forward who won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1992 and helped the previously woeful Charlotte Hornets make a couple of playoff appearances.

When a bidding war recently broke out over it, we started thinking about the future of the Outdoor Channel, a channel that obviously resonates and is popular with men. But, beyond the Outdoor Channel, what's happening with technology and outdoor sports -- hunting, fishing, etc.?