"Twas the week before Christmas, when alone in my house/ I was finishing shopping, with a click of the mouse;/Then I cleared out my browser cache, cookies deleted,/ In hopes of nefarious snooping, defeated." -- Josh meets Santa!

Santa slipped into a PowerPoint-induced coma today halfway through the annual Elfin Performance Dashboard presentation. "I guess we had a few too many metrics," said Lenny, Chief Analytical Elf.

Attention, all finance executives seeking to understand the ROI on marketing investments...Over the years I've learned that if I come home to find something in the house broken or missing, I'm much more likely to get the truth if I ask my kids "does anyone know anything about [fill in the blank]" than if I ask "Who broke this?" or "Who took my [whatever]?" The latter approach immediately sends everyone into damage control mode, while the former gives them a bit more latitude to respond in a responsible way.

Back in 1997, when it was my turn to be President/CEO of Simmons, we used to do research on the concept of magazine affinity: the notion that the same ad can have a differential effect on the same consumer depending on the magazine in which the ad was run. Media companies spend millions of dollars on the experience that consumers have with their brands, and media vehicles absolutely have brand equity. Think for a moment about the media category of national newspapers in the US. It's basically a three-brand category: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA …

Among the wide-ranging -- and occasionally unusual -- job titles I've had in my career, almost all have featured a single word: "representativeness." Confusing to some and misunderstood by others, "representativeness" appears in these job titles because of its fundamental ability to help the research industry answer our client's most pressing business questions. So I pose the question: What is representativeness, and how do we know it when we see it? As someone with a long job history of positions with "representativeness" in the title, I hope I can bring some perspective to this question.

One of the most popular measures of relative marketing effectiveness continues to be monitoring share-of-voice (SOV), a metric based on your total marketing/advertising spend as a percentage of the total spend in your category. Some even go a step further and look at an index of SOV to SOM (share of market). The argument for doing so is that if your SOV is less than your SOM, you are at risk of losing share. Presumably, the converse is then also true -- that if your SOV is greater than SOM, you should expect to gain share.

Prediction markets have been around for quite a while now. The Iowa Electronic Marketplace is world-renowned for accurately forecasting the outcomes of U.S. elections often many months prior to election day. More recently, companies like Consensus Point, Crowdcast, and InTrade (among others) have brought tools and technologies to the boardroom that allow managers to tap into global pools of "experts" to attempt to predict the future.

Media buyers and baseball coaches are a lot alike. Successful baseball coaching and media buying are both largely numbers games. Both professions are flooded with statistics and data of all kinds, but the best coaches and media buyers know how to focus on the relevant data and actively apply it while ignoring all the noise and second guessing.

We talk about the Internet as the most measurable medium. But you know, the medium doesn't just go and measure itself. As with the other media, you've got to actually go out and collect some data. Unlike traditional media, however, the technology behind the Internet lends itself to such data collection -- hence the "most measurable" title. And of course, I'm talking about tagging.

Question: What do Steve Martin (actor) and the Association of National Advertisers' Masters of Marketing have in common? Read on for the answer.