At this year's TED Conference, the risks that face the Internet were on dramatic display.

Behind Zuckerberg's overly solicitous proclamations of user control sits a hard truth: You can give people as much control you want over who sees their information. It won't make a dang bit of difference--because Facebook is asking the wrong questions.

I spent an amazing morning today at Media Kitchen's annual Venture Capital Conference in New York City listening to leaders in media, investing and banking talk about "new TV": the merging of broadcast TV, social video and everything in between. In my remarks, I focused on what I thought would the key drivers of the advertising industry over the next five years. Here they are - and AI is not one of them:

We are moving toward a world where voice is becoming more important, and the way we speak is quickly becoming the primary means of interaction -- not only with other people, but with machines. Poor grammar, useless fillers, broken language and mumbling make it harder to get your point across or to get an action to be undertaken.

Let's face it. We love it when smartasses get theirs. And the capo di tutti capi of smartasses is Mark Zuckerberg. As mad as we are about the gushing security leak that has sprung on his watch, aren't we all a little bit schadenfreude-ish as we watch the public flailing that is currently playing out? It's immensely satisfying to point a finger of blame -- and it's doubly so to point it at Mr. Zuckerberg. Which finger you use I'll leave to your discretion.

There's lots of talk about cool new hardware these days. Oculus GO is soon to hit the market with a price point of $199 that's sure to accelerate the virtual reality space. The ultra-secretive Magic Leap, with funding at a staggering 1.9 billion, also sounds like a company with a product that may come out from behind the curtain. But the big question for users isn't what hardware will they buy, but rather: What exactly will virtual reality software do to change the way we experience storytelling?

Both marketers and consumers are conflicted about digital advertising, according to recent events -- and WARC's recently published Global Ad Trends report.

RampUp, a confab about marketing tech, took place last month in San Francisco. This conference sets the tone for our odyssey into loop-closing, intention-stalking, consumer-clairvoyant, data-driven digital marketing.The main takeaway was that the speed of change continues unabated. Details follow.

Across the board, every marketer will agree the marketing tech landscape is a bloated mess. I have yet to attend a conference and see a session where someone doesn't throw up one of those landscape charts and make a sly comment about what a disaster this is. They then, almost inevitably, throw a lightbox over the entire landscape and simply highlight Google and Facebook to make the point that all you really need do is focus on these players and you can be successful.

There are many studies done that quantify "time spent." But the simple truth is that media is too big a catchall category to make this quantification meaningful. We're not even attempting to compare apples and oranges. We're comparing an apple, a jigsaw and a meteor. The cognitive variations alone in how we consume media are immense.