I have a friend who started taking a night class several months ago. When I ran into her recently, I asked how the class was going, and she told me she'd stopped attending it after just a few weeks. She had quickly become totally lost and wasn't learning anything. When I probed a bit, she confessed that two prerequisite classes were recommended in order to understand her class material, but she'd opted not to take them, thinking her professional experience had taught her enough of what she needed to know. That conversation with my friend got me thinking about surprising …

Thinking seasonally this summer, the IAB recently released a study on the path to purchase of skincare products and suntan lotion. In partnership with Prosper Insights and Analytics, we found that summer suncare shopping has far more to tell us about how the digital age is opening up opportunities for CPG marketers and retailers than one might think.

We are quickly moving to a world of cross-channel hyper-targeting. The notion of database-precise targeting is not just for direct response campaigns anymore, but now can be used for brand campaigns. The promise is to provide a laser-focused effort in delivering not just an offer, but also a brand experience to a targeted individual. The most critical piece in the process is to have the right data to know whom to target.

The unprecedented tsunami of data available to marketers has dramatically changed digital advertising - and the ways CMOs must make decisions about it. Big Data continues to amplify digital's capabilities and creates entirely new ones. Marketers now have a nearly infinite number of variables they can tweak to design the best campaigns possible for their audiences. Yet as the ad world becomes more automated thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, data collection and analysis is more complex than ever before. A 2012 Gartner report found that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs. However, new …