One of the key reasons I became a consultant was to help agencies figure out how to reinvent themselves in order to meet the need for modern, media-influenced communications solutions. More and more shops were questioning how to build for the future, usually by some means of getting media and strategy and/or creative to work together more closely, and in my 20 years on the agency side one of my favorite parts of the job was breaking down the walls between those disciplines.

The March issue of MEDIA magazine marks the third year in which we have selected a Person of the Year, and at first glance, Stephen Colbert might seem an odd choice. In truth, we thought long and hard before settling on Colbert. In the past we chose people - iGod Steve Jobs in 2006, and inconvenient-truth teller Al Gore in 2007 - whom we believed had the greatest overall impact on the world of media during the preceding 12 months. This year, we are picking Colbert for what he symbolizes: The pseudo nature of modern media's mash-up, faux culture, and …

Like a Victorian novel, the saga of Arbitron's Portable People Meter (PPM) service for radio ratings goes on and on and on; just when everything seems neatly wrapped up, a new villain emerges - and turns out to be an old villain everyone thought was dead.

When it comes to their depictions of the real world, the media have always walked a pretty fine line. Lately, it seems the virtual world may be winning out. It's a progression as old as canvas, vinyl, celluloid or magnetic tape, but the ephemeral and amorphous nature of digital media appears to be pushing the boundaries separating our actual world from our pseudo-societies.

Do you want the good news or the bad news?

Who knows who Stephen Colbert really is? Who really cares? Certainly not Colbert himself. He was once a kid from Charleston, S.C., who grew up Irish-Catholic and graduated from Northwestern University with artistic pretensions. He is now such a muddle of refracted irony - a paradox of self-reference and false sincerity - and the work of teams of writers, that the actor has disappeared completely into the surrealistic world he's created.