Having grown up in the business as a second-generation creative, Stephen Gates is showing all he can do as creative director of Starwood Hotels and Resorts. This past year, Gates oversaw the launch of two beautifully designed sites, LuxuryCollection.com and Westin.com, both of which built on a foundational user experience that brought the brands' core values to life.

A lot of people know Tim Ellis is Volkswagen's vp marketing, but most don't know he used to be a stage actor. For what it's worth - and I'm sure Ellis will concur - acting is about risk, and actors are willing to risk a lot to make a character come to life. Volkswagen's willingness to take risks since Ellis came on board in late 2007 is certainly reflected in campaigns both traditional and digital.

An iconic American brand with a multibillion-dollar business built on a secret formula isn't easily given to risk-taking. (Remember New Coke?) But at the Coca-Cola Company, Tom Daly has helped nudge the beverage giant into the digital and mobile future. From seizing on the YouTube sensation of the "Diet Coke-Mentos Experiments" to letting a pair of fans build its Facebook page, the company has loosened up during Daly's tenure.

Like many agency media executives, Amanda Richman began her career in the traditional agency business, before the great unbundling that cleaved media and creative into separate types of agencies, back when the word digital was more likely to be used in reference to watches than widgets.

Digital media may be known for its measurement capabilities, but for Rob Norman, CEO of GroupM Interaction, his entry into the digital world came about through some serendipity in 1993. "I was literally in the tube," recalls Norman, a native Brit. "And I was in a 'what's going to happen next?' phase of my career."

Renny Gleeson's resume doesn't read like the typical CV of someone with a strategic position at a major agency, but, on the other hand, as disciplines like strategy, media and creative merge - particularly in digital - Gleeson's myriad experiences may become more commonplace in the agency world.

Eyeblaster has unveiled a platform aimed at simplifying processes to speed up and manage workflow. MediaMind, nearly three years in the making at a cost of several million dollars and hundreds of agency interviews, provides a host of features aimed at removing the complexities associated with managing digital campaigns, such as the hours agencies spend trafficking ads or keeping track of where and when they ran.

It's been happening for a while, but Internet ad spending has surpassed TV advertising. OK, it's in the UK, but it still marks a major moment for the "World" Wide Web, and has clear implications for the U.S. market. UK advertisers spent about $2.8 billion online in the first six months of the year, a 4.6 percent year-on-year increase, according to the report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured Internet advertising, just over $31 million was spent online. All told, it took the Internet little more than …

If a marketing executive didn't know any better - and let's face it, many don't - he might be tempted to try his luck seeding viral content on 4chan.org, the bare-bones collection of message boards that's launched notable Internet memes from Lolcats to Rickrolling. If the site can produce such resonant content spontaneously, then surely someone with the force of an ad agency and an actual budget can make it work for him, right?

Larry Allen is all too familiar with the current pain that publishers are feeling. The president of Yieldex says there is one thing that he is hearing more than anything else: Publishers need to be more accountable these days than they've ever been before. And many of them don't know how to make their own data more actionable in order to achieve that goal.