I am writing this as I fly to Europe for the Monaco Media Forum, where much of the focus over the next couple of days will be the growth of digital media and marketing around the world. If you're in the U.S., why should you care about this? You should care because the percentage of the global online ad market represented by the U.S. is only going to go down. If you want strong, long-term growth, you will need to be global to serve the needs of global advertisers.

Now that it's November, there's no better time than the present to lay out my predictions for 2008! I know, I know... some of you might think it's a little early, but I like to be first, so that none of my predictions are too heavily influenced by what everyone else is thinking. So with that brief explanation for jumping the gun, here are some of my bold and not-so-bold predictions for 2008

Don't get me wrong, I love what Microsoft is doing. The concept of proper "click attribution," or giving credit to all of the impression prior to a click that may have contributed to the end result, is an important step in the evolution of online advertising....

So I was visiting with my grandmother yesterday and the phone kept ringing off the hook.She ran to answer the phone many times, then got mad and slammed the phone down. I asked her what was wrong. She said, "These damn people keep calling me to buy stuff. I don't know how the heck they got my number."

According to a three-year study by the Advertising Research Foundation and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, ads that tell a branding story work better than ads that focus on product positioning. While this study of advertising effectiveness and emotion is fascinating, it's critical to acknowledge that its greatest relevance really has nothing to do with advertising. The most valuable takeaway is at the core brand level -- specifically, how our minds are hardwired to embrace narratives and distill meaning with emotional force.

Just as advertising paid for over-the-air radio and television and kept the cost of newspapers and magazines to something reasonable for subscribers and newsstand buyers, so too will advertising pay for online content. Online offers us the tools to serve the most relevant and useful advertising in the history of marketing. But relevancy comes at a price. And some on the privacy ramparts think that price is getting too high.

This week I spoke to a bunch of industry professionals trying to create a legitimate, ad-supported marketplace using Peer to Peer (P2P) networks. It was an interesting opportunity because, as I mentioned to them, P2P is sort of a "dirty word" in advertising circles, for the same reasons that social networking is not yet a mature medium: the content. In social networking people are afraid their brands will come up alongside inappropriate content. In P2P they're afraid their brands will be associated with an illegal and/or inappropriate activity. The fact is that the P2P is quickly becoming a legitimate atmosphere …

Last week in "A Tipping Point For Social Media Advertising" we began to explore the ever-expanding role of the tipping point phenomenon to tomorrow's advertisers. We focused on the need for advertisers to achieve intermediate goals of engineering tipping points for their social media campaigns in order to effectively achieve the end goal: having engineered cultural tipping points for their brands/products. So now that we know what will be required of tomorrow's social media advertisers, it begs the question: When will this industry reach its tipping point?

Well, I must say I had no idea today was named World Internet Day. While we don't have the day off work, I thought it would be fun to pay homage to our way of life. Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

"Dear Max A. Kalehoff: I bet you remember the first time you heard the unmistakable mating call of your computer's modem dialing into an ISP. And I'm guessing you remember the feelings of frustration that it brought too. Well, soon you're going to feel the same way about your High Speed Internet. That's because we're about to change your expectations of what Internet should be, with Verizon FiOS."...