Television executives, welcome to the rathole otherwise known as the fight against piracy. Now it's your turn to fight an uphill battle, one that the music industry has waged for more than a decade to the tune of shrinking profits and smaller sales.

Trying to predict the future is a thankless job, especially when money's involved: Equal parts art and science, the value of a revenue forecast necessarily remains unknown until its predictions come true, or don't -- at which point the world has probably moved on to the next forecast. Still there seems to be limitless demand for "industry outlooks," cited (usually without question) in myriad Powerpoint presentations and articles in the trade press. This makes sense psychologically, satisfying our natural desire for foreknowledge and a feeling of security -- but is this feeling really justified?

James Dean must be turning over in his grave. It seems the lure of fast cars and the open road is past its prime. This summer, Nissan is betting the bank that kids love their smartphones more than any convertible. It is introducing its boxy little Cube in the United States as basically a big iPhone on wheels.

From the first days of Pong, the video game industry has been on a relentless hunt to make virtual worlds look, sound and move more like the world we experience - or at least fantasize about. Now, a new coterie of computer scientists and avant-garde marketers may reverse the polarity of that trend and give those virtual worlds a dose of reality.

Don't call it a "search engine." It's a "knowledge" engine or "decision" engine. The technology continues to move past hot-linked blue lines into text snippets and expandable video clips. And while executives at Google, Microsoft, WolframAlpha and others declined to speculate on what search will look like 10 years from now, they all agree it won't look anything like it does today.

Forget Animal House and the old stereotypes regarding college students. Today's 18- to 24-year-olds have more than beer bongs on their minds.

Tim Hanlon, one of Madison Ave.'s formidable digital gurus and executive vice president of VivaKi Ventures, has a clear vision of where media and marketers need to be in the digital world - even if he has to drag them kicking and screaming. On a summer Chi-town afternoon, in a window seat at Keefer's across from the storied Harry Caray's Bar on Kinzie Street, Hanlon is all about deep thought on media trends to which he gives his own labels like "IP-ization," "atomization" and "dimensionalization." He is a former journalist with a strategist's mind, and he's not afraid to use …

Alcohol marketers try to get consumers liquored up but not out of control: Courtney and Carter Reum lived the good life as investment bankers -- working hard and playing hard. The brothers tried to balance those 80-hour work weeks with pleasure -- for example, a 2003 surfing trip to Brazil.

Working with the in-house team: Does this dialogue sound familiar to you? Client: Meet [IT guy name], our IT guy. He'll be implementing the changes you recommend. You: Hi, [IT guy name]. Pleased to meet you. it Guy: Yeah. I know SEO, too. It's not hard.

Recently I attended a conference on Google Analytics where industry guru Justin Cutroni suggested that we look at the bounce rate as an interesting way to track the percentage of consumers who, after performing a Google search, landed on content of so little interest that they immediately clicked back to the serp (Search Engine Result Page).