Have you ever sat through a long-winded, totally irrelevant, and completely un-engaging, boring presentation? I have. More than once. Our industry is notorious for talking about ourselves endlessly. We make broad, sweeping statements about how our idea or our technology is the best thing since sliced bread and how our platform will "totally change the way consumers interact with media," but that's all pretty bogus.

Is Nike a consumer-products or a new-media company? It sounds like a ludicrous question, until you consider the shifting resource focus of Nike's brand gurus highlighted in this week's Louise Story article in The New York Times. "We want to find a way to enhance the experience and services, rather than looking for a way to interrupt people from getting to where they want to go," says Stefan Olander, global director for brand connections at Nike, in the article.

Ah, just what I love to hear: big brands mandating more of a digital push. Better late than never, guys. That being said, I'm a bit unlike my comrades. I don't believe that digital media should be a certain percentage of the overall media spend generically. I see percentages thrown in pitches and media plans with no real rationale behind it. Simply put, it depends on the brand and what the media objective is.

"I just don't have time for all these social networks!" the head of a prominent social network told me this week. "How can anyone be in so many places at the same time?" a prominent advertising exec asked me. And "I keep getting spammed by everyone's stupid trivia questions," we've certainly all complained It seems more and more people are suffering from social network fatigue, which I'm now coining socialnetworkitis.

The annual meeting of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is kicking off today in Phoenix and, as you would expect, everybody is talking about digital. Today's Wall Street Journal, in a headline about a research report released to coincide with the event, went so far as to suggest that "digital" was the password to this year's meeting.

Health is the new black! I am referring to the fact that the health category is generating lots of buzz again as the new category "du jour," and is fast becoming the next big area for funding. The buzz started a few weeks ago when rumors started circulating that Google was making a play for WebMD while building its own health information storage system. That deal hasn't materialized as of yet, but ever since I've been hearing from VCs and angels alike as they all recognize that the health category is one of the most highly utilized portions of the …

This week I came across a doctoral study (http://www.wfanet.org/docfiles/A2061D1412.pdf) examining the nature of the relationship between advertising spend and economic growth that really caught my interest (in case you are wondering, yes, I think it's sad that I just typed that sentence...). From the conclusion: "Analysis of all of the objective data relating to the developed countries clearly demonstrates that the media and non-traditional media advertising investments carried out by companies stimulate and promote consumption, innovation, competition and the dynamism of specific economic sec¬tors associated with advertising: media service providers, non-traditional media, etc."

Remember when Internet advertising in the early days was called new media? It's funny, every now and then I still hear the term used in that way. Like the industry, the term has morphed into the new "new." What could fall under it? Streaming audio and video, video uploads and downloads, RSS feed, social media, downloadable music, blogs... the list goes on.

Did you know that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the hijackers were Iraqi? Of course, I'm joking. Saddam Hussein was not directly involved in planning the Sept 11, terrorist attacks, and most of the hijackers were not Iraqi. The problem with this counter of accurate information, however, is that denials and clarifications can actually contribute to the resilience of popular myths. This paradox is according to Shankar Vedantam at the Washington Post, who recently published a fascinating analysis of several recent psychological studies on falsehoods.

We all know that online advertising has the capacity to do extraordinary things when it comes to delivering highly addressable and measured advertising. How is it then, many ask, when you go to most Web pages, you get the same old ads that you see everywhere, and you rarely see ads that are truly relevant to you?