When company CEOs make big statements about change in mission my skeptical journalistic brain kicks in. Is this a PR move, or a change to address advertiser pressure, or something more deeply held and profound? For Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the changes he and the Facebook team are implementing could be missed in the massive noise of Internet pronouncements. But that would be a mistake.

You might not agree, but I believe most people want to know the truth.

It's not because I don't want to attend all of the parties or because I don't have any yacht invitations. My inbox has been full of them. It's not because I don't have the right clothes. I still have those awesome lightweight blue suede loafers that I bought in Cannes four or five years ago.

A lot has been written about the role that advertising should play in supporting or not supporting fake news. I err on the side that advertising does have a responsibility to only support credible sources and true, authentic, genuine content. Unfortunately, I am not responsible for all ad dollars on a global scale.

Every day that Barack Obama was in the White House, he read 10 letters. Why letters? Because form matters. There's still something about a letter. It's so intimate. It uses a tactile medium. Emotions seem to flow easier through the use of cursive loops and sound of pen on paper. They balance between raw and reflective. As such, they may be an unusually honest glimpse into the soul of the writer. Obama seemed to get that. There was an entire team of hundreds of people at the White House that reviewed 10,000 letters a day and chose the 10 that ...

After Marc Raibert's TED talk, I found myself drawn to a crowd gathering outside the theater. I wanted a selfie. But not with Raibert. I wanted a selfie with SpotMini, an electronic, quadruped robot that looks like a cross between a large dog and a small giraffe. He was cute, almost cuddly. And, with just a dash of sci-fi imagination, terrifying.

Digital News Daily Editor Tobi Elkin wrote an article earlier this week asking if anything has changed in the marketing/ad world since the release of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA)'s Media Transparency Report about a year ago. She quotes from three ad-tech company players, whose reactions can be be summarized as: "Not too much has changed, and marketers should do more to retake control of their ad dollars in digital LaLaLand." While I agree that marketers probably could do more, I take issue with the tone of this and other industry reactions to the one-year anniversary that not much ...

As an industry, we need to focus on the voices of the people who have the most leverage, who have the budgets and who are responsible for creating brand engagement with the consumer. These are the folks whose opinions matter the most, but unfortunately these are the people who speak and write the least in industry forums. How do you get these people to drive the conversation in the most appropriate direction?

So, here's the question: Could Sears -- the retail giant that has become the poster child for the death of mall-based retail shopping -- have saved itself? This is an important question, because I don't think Sears' downward trend is an isolated incident.

I have been straddling the European and North American continents for most of my professional and personal life, and I have always had the benefit of exposure to both. Let's not forget: the U.S. has had advertising in general, including commercial TV advertising, far longer than most other nations on the planet. In fact, the U.S. has never NOT had commercial TV - it always was commercial. Most of Europe has had commercial TV since the 1960s to late 1980s (in The Netherlands and parts of former Soviet Eastern Europe, for instance). That's right. What you consider to be "normal" ...