I wanted to talk to you about the art of the deal. No, not that one, but the one in marketing and advertising sales. Over the last few weeks I have had a bunch of meetings and workshops with a diverse groups of sellers, ranging from TV to radio to CRM. And it struck me that salespeople could really do with applying a truth of modern marketing.

"Amazon is buying Whole Foods." It's impossible to overestimate the impact those five words will have on the future of consumer marketing, media and advertising as we know it today. If marketers thought they knew disruption, they are about to experience exponential disruption.

How much of your advertising campaign is strategic vs. impulsive? What balance do you strike between thinking things through from the outset and implementing a plan with a longer-term vision, versus optimization and being reactive to reporting, metrics and what's going on around you? If I were to offer up a poll, I'd probably see 90% of you saying you were strategic and implementing a long-term vision. But in reality, I can safely assume that at best, 50% of your campaigns are strategically planned and not reactive to what's going on around you.

Here's a troubling fact. According to a study from the Georgia Institute of Tech, half of all selfies taken have one purpose. They are intended to show the world how attractive we are: our makeup, our clothes, our shoes, our lips, our hair. This category accounts for more selfies than all other categories combined -- more than selfies taken with people or pets we love, more than us doing the things we love, more than being in the places we love, more than eating the food we love. It appears that the one thing we love the most is ourselves. …

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.