Here is a statement that's not hard to make: I couldn't possibly disagree with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In a piece last week, Nat Ives quoted Schmidt saying, "Brands are the solution, not the problem.... Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." What Schmidt is saying is that brands can play a major role in improving the content of the Internet by supporting quality content. My question is, what is Google doing to help?

How should we organize for digital marketing? I sometimes wonder how straight a question that really is. Recently, I was asked to help a friend consult with a CPG company that wanted to know this very thing. The client was very focused on models to follow, predictive trends, and -- truth be told -- a crystal-clear, single prevailing schema on how to organize around the Web site and all inbound digital marketing. Company strategists had commissioned reams of consultants before us to survey, benchmark, analyze, align enterprise interests -- and were no further along than when started.

We used to live in a world where few people produced content and most people consumed it. Thanks to the Web, nearly every digitally connected person creates some sort of content, and nobody can consume it all. This has enabled a new phenomenon of content contribution that's changing the world: crowdsourcing. According to Wikipedia -- a prime example, itself -- "crowdsourcing is a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call." It's all about user contributions, and it's proliferated with the explosion …

Earlier this week, I received a particularly heart-warming email.

Waving the flag of brand-building in an accountable marketplace is akin to saying "you have no idea what you're doing." Building a brand is not the end goal of your marketing, so don't pretend that is how you are spending your money when you can track far beyond that goal.

It is easy to ignore the role marketing plays in shaping nations. Marketing not only affects what people consume, but what is produced. Marketing, like it or not, shapes our political process. Marketing guides people's selection of politicians, and then impacts the way politicians govern once in office. The truth, is marketing can be more impactful than any legislation. Just look at how the financial markets react to a change in consumer confidence. The brand of our government, the brand of our economy and the brand of the United States itself, has taken a beating in recently. What role can, …

As marketing, media and creative professionals, we often examine our relationships with the "A word" -- that is, awards. How much do awards matter to us? Should we have an active submission plan? How much should we collaborate with our clients on seeking awards? I'm not sure how many schools of thought there are on this, but there are definitely more than one.

My friend Nigel Hollis, chief global aalyst at WPP's Millward Brown, an advertising research firm, invited friends to submit brand questions, and receive personal replies and insights in return. This was in anticipation of his forthcoming book, "The Global Brand," based on Millward Brown's annual BrandZ study of 10,000 brands in 31 countries. Always up for challenging Nigel's classical research assumptions, I submitted a question many advertising researchers struggle to answer: how corporate actions holistically shape brands versus marketing communications. His response was very good, so I thought I'd share his insights here.

The U.S. newspaper industry is in tough times, and it's getting worse. As many of you know, I worked in the newspaper industry a number of years ago and like to write about it from time to time. Given the financial predicaments that many U.S. newspaper companies find themselves in these days, particularly those that publish metropolitan, or "big city," papers. I thought that I would use today's column to offer some of my suggestions for "reconstructing" the American metropolitan newspaper.

Media planning is a combination of art and science -- and whether you know it or not, it has been changing over the last few years. There are many traditional ways to create a media plan, but the basics are always the same: you identify the target audience and then hypothesize the right types of media vehicles and placements that will reach them with a targeted message. What has changed is the difference between tactical media planning and strategic media planning. Many agencies practice tactical media planning rather than strategic media planning, and there is a subtle difference. Tactical …