How many marketing-conference tote bags do you have piling up in your office? For me, conference totes have lost their appeal. They've reached saturation, and this is underscored by the fact I've received at least 21 of them since the beginning of 2006. Conference totes have become so terribly abundant that one could argue they're now an environmental hazard. In an age where sustainability is becoming a key dimension of social and corporate responsibility, we simply can't continue along this path!

Three times in the past two weeks, I have been asked my opinion on the current state of "view-thru" conversion tracking. It seems that lots of people these days are concerned that view-thru tracking has gotten a bit out of control and is distorting the connection between the actual effectiveness of individual media properties and their "apparent" contribution to driving conversions for advertisers.

Over the last three months I've given a presentation on the future of Internet TV more than 40 times -- and every audience for this presentation has resoundingly agreed that Internet TV represents the single most exciting area of growth for advertising over the next five years. I typically share my thoughts on the i-TV future and provide rationale and support for how to sell it, but I don't need to do that today. The rationale and support is all over the place and is slapping our clients in the face with the obvious nature of the message. No; I …

User-generated advertising is not the future of advertising. The task of imagining, producing and distributing a compelling brand message will not be left to whoever chooses to pick up a webcam on a random Sunday afternoon. Instead, I propose that the radical shift, commonly mis-titled user-generated advertising, descending over the world of advertising is in fact better called distributed creative development.

Yep, you guessed it. Latinos are one of the fastest-growing demographics online. So what does this mean to us? We need to take a look at what seems to be a generation gap. One study revealed that 75% of U.S.-born Hispanics were online, as opposed to 43% that were born outside the U.S. One key to predicting online usage seems to be language: Those who speak English fluently tend to go online, while only a third of Latinos who just speak Spanish go online.

Blogs, boards, buzz and, well, more buzz! Since my job is at the center of measuring all this stuff, I get to hear how a lot of marketers and agencies are aligning around this emerging area we call consumer-generated media (CGM). And that begs the question: Who will own this space?

Google is a big company that is leading the online ad industry at the moment, and it tend to take pretty aggressive steps to get even better, which is always nice to see in a market leader. While I have been critical in the past of some of its attempts to leverage its strong search position into a brand advertising position, I want to call out two initiatives that have recently been written about that I think are very, very smart.

NIN (or for those of you who aren't familiar with them, Nine Inch Nails) has been and continue to be one of the most influential and ground-breaking bands of the last 15 years. Being the music-obsessed junkie that I am, I cannot help but appreciate what NIN founder Trent Reznor has done for alternative as well as mainstream music -- and now I appreciate what he is doing for online marketing just as much.

I wanted to give a preview of what I will be arguing on my OMMA Hollywood panel "Is the Future of advertising 100% Google?" If what is being proposed is, will Google be the end-to-end solution for all of advertising, I think it's actually pretty easy to argue against. But if we are asking if Google could potentially become the most efficient and effective system through which all advertising opportunities are bought and served, than you have a more interesting debate.

I keep hearing it. Everyone's talking about You Tube, My Space, social networking and user-generated content. Well, I certainly can't delve into all these topics in this short column. However, let's bring it to the surface: what's up with the digital space? Are we doing more than talking about this stuff? Or has it become bulletized nomenclature among meetings, brainstorm sessions, presentations and fodder for columnists like me? I'm a little sick of wanton banter.