All the buzz nowadays is about technology. This is no surprise, really. The whiz-bang gadgetry of the new media landscape is utterly extraordinary, so it's well-deserving of all the attention. But when we quit gawking and look closely, we see the coming of something more important than the eye-popping wizardry of widgets, wireless and Wi-Fi. It's a growing shift in when and where we use media, not just a change in what we can do with the media at hand.

We are anectdotal animals - we like to reduce very complex and uncertain times to simple rules or conclusions. Talking heads on cable make an industry out of it; political candidates show as little nuance or doubt as possible. Such abstractions, however gratifying in the short run, usually are the No. 1 cause of people missing a major trend that's right under their noses.

It seems fashionble lately for people in our business to eschew the word "advertising." Somewhere along the line the term became distasteful, linked to earlier times when one-way, one-message communication was enough to do the job of selling goods to the public. Heard of any new ad agencies launching lately? Probably not. Instead, we hear terms like "brand studio," "brand-messaging lab" and myriad other newfangled labels that make what we do for a living sound far more complex and sophisticated.

Good luck getting through an article or conference on digital media without the assembled masses crying, "How are we going to measure it?" While budgets continue to pour into online media, metrics need to expand to assess the true impact.

Is WPP channeling Frank Zappa? Probably not, but they are exorcising the ghost of Madison & Vine. In April, WPP's media agency, MindShare, dropped MindShare Entertainment as a stand-alone practice and squeezed it into a unit called "Invention." The MindShare brass appears to have reached a conclusion shared by many in the industry - that so-called branded entertainment is not a discipline unto itself but simply another paintbrush in the toolbox.

To many Americans, summer means baseball. I am not one of those people. Yet every year I go to the ball park. I am quite content to stuff my face with hot dogs, nachos, beer and peanuts. By the time I am done eating, it is already the fourth inning. I suffer until the seventh-inning stretch and then say my good-byes. Still, despite my misgivings about the game itself, perhaps it can provide some insight into the game of advertising.

Recently, a good friend of ours (we'll call him Marlon) was exploring career opportunities with a respectable global ad agency when the conversation took an interesting turn. At a time when job-seekers are proceeding carefully, Marlon was pondering which of many varied opportunities to take.

I've been writing for this column for close to three years now, and a few days ago I took a couple of leisurely moments to breeze through some of my old pieces, which made me think that it might be time to recap - for my own edification, if nothing else: a compendium, if you like, of the new consumer. Who are they, and what makes them different?

Mark Twain once quipped, "When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear." When longtime WNBC news anchor Sue Simmons dropped her F-bomb on poor Chuck Scarborough, she maybe should have chosen counting.

As I write this, I've got summer on my mind. And it's not just the sweltering heat in New York City where Media magazine is based, or the fact that the air conditioning was on the fritz in the offices of MediaPost (which publishes this magazine) during the earliest heat wave I can remember in this region.