Surely you know about the monsters in your closet. For consumers, these hairy guys are you -- the advertiser or the agency wielding sinister ad tracking and targeting voodoo. For you, the lurking monsters are the consumer privacy bill, to be introduced shortly by Congressman (D-Virginia) Rick Boucher -- a sign of the mounting, irreversible reality of more governmental control over our industry.

Like most people, I don't like marketing messaging that interrupts, distracts, exaggerates or condescends. For me, marketing messages are most welcome when they counter complexity and confusion, or solve a specific problem at just the right time. Which is why I've been particularly intrigued by some 10-second audio ads from Ally Bank that run at the beginning of Planet Money, an intelligent money-for-dummies podcast on NPR....

I spent several days this week at the Advertising Research Foundation's 56th Annual Convention, Re:think 2010. As conferences go, ARF's this year was a good one, with some really insightful contributions from many of the speakers. Here are my top 10 takeaways from the sessions I attended:

Our business is maturing pretty rapidly, but one of the biggest issues is that we don't have any easy way to make an equivocal measurement of the impact we have on driving appreciable business growth.

I'm in shock that there's even a debate about the viability of advertising in social media. The only thing that outweighs my shock is my awe of the denial of some marketers that if they just "join the conversation" (still not sure why I want a brand in my conversation), then they don't need to figure out how to buy advertising.

There is a familiar term in venture capital circles, "pre-revenue," which designates potential ventures where revenue streams do not yet exist or value is still debatable. I found this term floating through my head this weekend while attending a conference on mobile marketing, an emerging market now truly coming into its own among media professionals.

I recently wrote about the growing hype in marketing circles around customer satisfaction and the Net Promoter methodology. The point of that post was to underscore that customer satisfaction and loyalty scoring is worthless if a company is not going to act on the intelligence. That column prompted a thoughtful reply from my friend Bruce Ertmann, a marketing veteran in the automotive industry: satisfaction scores are great, but what matters most is delivering on the promise.

Simple words can be very powerful. One of the most important tools a worker in the media and marketing world has is the power to say "no." Learning how and when to use the word is a vital lesson. This is true whether you are in sales, client service or product development. It's particularly true in start-up companies, where resources are scarce, historical guidance is short, and making too many promises is devastatingly more dangerous than making too few.

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.