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."

For many years the rich-media space was a hotbed of activity. All the usual suspects were out in the marketplace duking it out for the top spot. Yet somewhere along the way, through consolidation and a focus on data and ad networks, they seem to have lost their luster.

People tolerate advertising because they get something out of it, period. I am a little tired of hearing the argument "if it's the right ad in the right place, then people will be engaged." I am a huge fan of relevancy, but you're not going to convince me that it's possible to achieve perfect relevancy and solve the issue of advertising on the Internet.