For more and more aspects of our lives, the Internet is the "everyday answer." For travel, almost everyone uses the Internet over a travel agent or calling an airline directly. Surprisingly, financial services have overcome privacy and security concerns and now most people bank online. This follows the acceptance of the ATM in lieu of branch visits, so perhaps is not too surprising. We see that people are managing their careers online, whether with job search (Careerbuilder) or resume management (Linkedin). Even finding love (Match.com) or other relationships (Craigslist or hookup.com) is more and more the mainstream. We read that …

We're in the end game of the Great Unbundling. News stories have become unbundled from newspapers, songs from CDs and books from paper. But video, today, remains mostly bound to its cable, broadcast and satellite transports. Most households in the US today subscribe to a multichannel offering that delivers the transport, and the channel bundle (mostly unwatched) as part of a monolithic service. But that's all going to change. Within the next five years, most of the video we consume will be delivered over an open IP network, not via proprietary cable, satellite or even broadcast streams. But even though …

I have always believed that media doesn't drive consumer behavior as much as consumer behavior informs the media we use. "Back in the day," when the conventional wisdom was "If you build it, they will come," I used to say (and still do), "When they are ready to come, you had better have it built!" For the better part of the 90's, predictions around the consumer embrace of interactive TV were rampant and aggressive, but until consumers understood interactivity from their use of engagement with the internet, TV would remain a passive, static experience. Without the web, and the way …

Let's face it: most publishing and marketing professionals have a love / hate relationship with their Web content management systems (CMS). For years I've watched publishers and marketers struggle with sub-par CMS options, including difficult-to-manage, home-grown legacy solutions; open source applications that are often obtuse and sorely lacking in features, flexibility, and basic documentation; and enterprise offerings that do some things very well and others poorly or not at all. Thankfully, the field is changing.

I've got plenty of theories about what will happen to the distant future of media, but right now, I'd like to focus on the imminent future of MEDIA - the magazine, that is. We're just about wrapping up the Fall issue, which not coincidentally, is themed around "The Future of Media," and is being guest edited by Brian Monahan, head of Interpublic's Magna Global unit, and managing director of Interpublic's Media Lab when the project began.

The future of media will be defined by a newly unfettered audience access to content, unlike its past, which was defined by control of distribution. This is a paradigmatic change with profound implications for publishers, distributors, creators, and advertisers, as well as everyone who uses media to inform or entertain themselves.

Media's future seems to be fairly clear: smaller, faster, lighter and much much more of it. If we think of formatting as evolving through a less is more paradigm, most marketers have ceased to send entire web pages to the inbox, thus tomorrow's format will have at its heart: portability. The proliferation of smart phones & tablets have spurred changes in design which affect the content of tomorrow's media.

We remain today a little under $3 billion shy of our 2007 high water revenue mark of $20 Billion. I'm quite confident that we are well on our way back to that number. But there are those who doubt our strengths. Some look at our top five categories and they see secular radio issues in our cyclical media world. - I do not. Some look to nascent pure play audio brands and see a radio problem with innovation - I do not.

Why is this concept so foreign --- advertising becoming more like customer relationship management? We see it at Moxie, and we see it across client work. Digital media is so data intensive that a natural correlation between the digital customer experience and traditional lifecycle marketing strategies is beginning to take shape in a very exciting way.

Today, demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, ad exchanges, and agency trading desks all traffic in online user data. Given the proliferation of data combined with technologies delivering ever greater personalization, will everyone in the future have a dashboard for selling their own data? The idea of giving people the ability to market their own data like one-person agencies has been around for some time but still hasn't been put into practice.