For as long as I can remember, the digital doyens at broadcast and cable TV companies have been trying to perfect the tandem over-air/Web viewing experience. In isolation, each of these experiments in "second screening" has been interesting enough, but I am not so sure they have become de rigueur. Most of us are not necessarily looking for the Web connection to drive us deeper into the TV experience so much as provide that low-level distraction we now seem to need. ADD is American culture's baseline behavior.

"You ran over your power cord with the lawn mower? Well, I guess we just have to go to Home Depot." Dammit! My partner lives for home repair. Home Depot is her haven. For me -- hell. No offense to the good people at Home Depot, but every aisle of obscure connectors and switches and fittings, every ambitious fixer-upper offering advice, just underscores my legendary incompetence as a homeowner. The deal was, we would go to Home Depot if we could also use the occasion to play with some of the various mobile apps that retailers are issuing to make …

The long, slow roll-out of the Apple iAds program continues to be more impressive in theory than in execution. Personally, I am all-in with the general notion that immersive experiences on a smaller screen have greater impact than a stray animated box on a cluttered desktop screen. Handled well, a rich-media ad could offer the user an entertaining encounter with a brand. And given the many rumors and tales of Apple's obsessive micromanagement of the ad creative on these first efforts, it is staggering to me that they aren't better.

When going to industry events, even in beautiful resort locations, don't bring the fiancée.

Since mobile gaming got some wind in its sails from the arrival of the Apple App Store, many of us have wondered whether smartphone gaming was going to erode Nintendo and Sony's handheld business. The answer is obvious. Both Nintendo and Sony responded to the app explosion with more robust downloadable game stores themselves, but the results have been mixed at best.

One of the most promising extensions of existing media to mobile has to be out-of-home. In fact, I wonder if eventually mobile marketing and advertising will be seen under the digital OOH category. I have already heard some agency executives talk about conceptualizing the mobile display and app platforms as extensions of their OOH strategy. Increasingly, as it uses location-based solutions, mobile feels less like a remote extension of the Web and something closer to being another screen in an out-of-home network, albeit a screen that is never predictably fixed.

Because of its TV roots and obvious ties to broadcast and cable advertisers, Hulu seems to be everyone's favorite professional-grade digital video service to watch. But while Hulu captured much of the press attention, the Vevo portal of music video may actually be the online video success story of the year. sessions. In raw audience, comScore now measures Vevo well ahead of Hulu.

Within two years I am sure that consulting a cell phone's many shopping resources in-store will be a reflex for many people. This is where the mobile platform maps perfectly with America's official national sport, consumption. This is also where the competition among retailers and their apps, third parties and their apps, and online retailers and their catalogs is going to become heated. The war for the aisles is just beginning.This week the dam seemed to burst with new offerings aimed at the in-store experience.

Getting into the app game is not easy for a lot of brands that don't have an obvious, relevant role on a smartphone. Rather than ask, how do we get an app of our own, they might start with the user and ask, what valuable tool does the user want we might sponsor?

I am not entirely sure that after two years of experience under marketers' belts, branded applications are any smarter or alluring now than they ever were. While there are many examples of success like Zippo's Virtual Lighter and VW's driving games, the App Store is still littered with loads of brand-driven apps that just make me scratch my head and wonder what some of these marketers were trying to achieve.