The American Telegram & Telegraph company might be shaking off the last of its 1880s dust; it recently teamed with a band from the double-oughts that borrows some of its sound from the 1980s and named itself for the decade after: AT&T and BBDO New York enlisted Scottish indie band 1990s for the "Beat City" spot - a computer-generated animation set to music to launch the new '80s-cum-retro-futuristic Sony Ericsson Walkman phone. Jackie McKeown, lead singer and guitarist, had a few comments on being the brand's new house band.

"Can you give me a referral?" Asked, searched and answered millions of times a day, this simple question slips past our multimillion-dollar marketing budgets, customer personas, targeted media plans, clever virals and message platforms to reach for human truth: "I trust your opinion. What do you think?"

One of the first brands of the commercial internet to bring online advertising out of the nerdery and into the mainstream was Yahoo. It was one of the first online destinations to accept advertising, and for a time, was the most recognizable brand exclusively on the Web. When it went public on April 12, 1996 (eight months after Netscape, the first dot-com to do so), Yahoo raised $33.8 million dollars by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

What a difference a decade makes. This thought struck me recently while I was dining with some colleagues from the interactive advertising ranks. They were talking (okay, complaining) about clients and agency partners who spend too much time and money trying to perfect their ads - even relatively simple banners - on the front end rather than just putting them out on the Web and seeing what works best. Their experiences sounded surprisingly similar to those of my colleagues in more traditional ad arenas.

This year for Halloween, i am going to dress up as one of the great advertising icons. No, I am not going as Tony the Tiger or Mayor McCheese. Instead, I will dress up as Miracle Max from The Princess Bride. Released 21 years ago last month, The Princess Bride remains a terrific movie about media buying.

As the last bits of patriotic confetti floated to the floor of Denver's Invesco Field during the closing moments of the Democratic National Convention, little could anyone - Democrat, Republican, National Socialist - guess that a scant 12 hours or so later, Barack Obama would have his spotlight stolen as media darling of the presidential election's dog-and-pony show.

[The future] is still very, very robust. On the media investment side, there's so much activity now. The challenge is the costs - Paper, oil, ink are going up. On top of that you're going to have another postal increase next year. A lot of people are complaining about tough economies, and we've all seen this before back in the mid-90s where it got real tough and real ugly and the ones that survived are the ones who are creative and think out of the box and say 'what about this'. Everyone knows it's quite a challenge.

"First off, you have tremendous consolidation within all of these industries, particularly in film and television, and there are fewer opportunities in some of these areas but others have opened up, for example, in the online area. One of the most remarkable trends is that many companies are refusing to give employment contracts for a specific term to anyone but their very senior executives. The business has been so volatile. The average life span of a television or movie executive is 18 months. What that does, it increases the likelihood of executives that can give greenlight to projects are more …

History is full of tales of disruptive technologies, material shortages and the innovations they inspired. Most of these stories had happy endings, with technological change yielding remarkable benefits to humanity. But the current trajectory of print media, which seems to be hurtling toward a catastrophic ending, has dire implications for Western democracies. To set the stage for examining the sorry state of print media today, let's look at the consequences of shortages and technological revolutions over the centuries.

What will it take to be a media executive of the future? What are the critical skills in your DNA that will contribute to your ability to lead and win?