Do you ever get the feeling that the ship has set sail and you may have missed the boat? When I think about the mobile advertising space, I tend to feel that way -- at least a little bit. Based on the lack of standardization and the rapid growth of competing platforms, I am going out on a limb and may be the first person to say that mobile advertising has plateau-ed -- at least in its current iteration.

The lack of parity between online and offline media buying has made the consumer shift to digital media consumption a very bumpy ride: And yet despite all the pain for media companies, and falling prices for online display advertising, there are still signs that digital revenues will eventually support quality content. The latest sign of digital's evolution is CBS Digital's coverage of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, and the impressive amount of revenue this move will generate.

he collaboration imperative has never been more pervasive inside agencies, across marketing organizations, and between partner or cooperative companies. On the sell side, it's still an aspiration -- with the objective of channel integration. And the market reality of richer options than ever has only intensified this imperative.

Most brand managers are aware of the risks of engaging in "black hat" and "gray hat" SEO tactics. These methods attempt to attract search traffic in a deceitful manner that violates search engines' terms of service. But there's a new threat emerging: SEO middlemen that participate in social media and blogger relations for the sole purpose of boosting search-engine traffic. Many of these efforts are backfiring. Let me share a recent personal example:

The next five to 10 years will bring enormous changes to the television media and advertising world. Not the least of those changes will be the development and use of new models to optimize the purchase of TV ad spots.

Crowd-sourcing, user-generated content, consumer-generated content: these were huge buzzwords from 2004-2008. Then along came Twitter and Facebook. Social media became the darling of the moment, and crowd-sourcing became a casualty of growth. Guess what! The UGC space and crowd-sourcing are still very much alive and kicking, but the focus seems to have shifted from consumers creating the content, to their becoming a waypoint for the content as it spreads.

A great local Web experience has long been promised by the Internet, but very rarely delivered. However, with the rise of services like Yelp and Foursquare, and continued improvements in geo-filtering tools, it appears that local will finally live up to its potential.

Recently I have been thinking about the subtleties of confidence: what can instill it and what can erode it, as we encounter each other in business. There's often a counter effect, too, whereby things that might inspire confidence, don't, and things that should rattle it, actually soothe.

Most companies spend a lot of time and money trying to market and communicate effectively to external stakeholders. But why do companies so often neglect and disrespect the inside? Sure, you'd better be effective with your external stakeholders, but aren't they dependent on the success of your internal stakeholders? The answer is yes. And highly effective organizations require internal marketing and communications on par with the outside.

I believe that TV shows need to be promoted to target viewers as close as possible to the moment when they are deciding what to watch: increasingly, the day or the hour the show airs, and not before. This is now necessary because of a convergence (or collision) of several phenomena in the television program promotion world of today -- clutter, recency, and the power of the "last impression."