Every year around this time I sit down and try to play Nostradamus for next year. I'm batting about .500 over the last 10 years, but it's worth a shot and gets me thinking proactively rather than reacting to what I see day in and day out. So, without further ado, my predictions for 2012:

We hear the proclamation of the death of the campaign regularly these days. The charge is primarily led by the hoards of self-proclaimed social media gurus, but underscores a similar mantra -- from a larger swath of the marketing community -- of the death of the "big idea." Make no mistake about it; the media and marketing world is changing in some fairly dramatic ways. However, the pronouncement of the material displacement of the old by the new has more hyperbole and shock value than reality. Traditional media and the fundamentals of marketing are alive and kicking, and evolving right …

While our national unemployment rate hovers at around 9%, the rate in our industry is much lower. In fact, some people I speak with now believe that the unemployment rate in media and technology is effectively zero. They may be right. Recruiters in New York tell me that they are having challenges finding talent across the board, whether it is for sales, analytics or programming positions. The talent crunch is highlighting our industry's limited progress in becoming more diversified in terms of gender and race, especially in sectors like advertising technology.

I confess: I have lowbrow taste. I'm in the midst of "A Song of Ice and Fire." I've read every Twilight. I've read every Jack Reacher. And, of course, I've read every Harry Potter. And so, when I noticed that many of my Facebook friends had read an article titled, ""Harry Potter's Secret Is Out After PR Slip Gives the Game Away,"" my curiosity got the better of me: I clicked. What I got was something you've probably seen by now: the permissions dialogue from The Independent, "A new social reading experience." This app shares articles I read with the …

Last week, six people died when a private plane crashed into Superstition Mountain near Phoenix, Ariz. Tens of millions of people have since watched a video of the crash that was captured, by coincidence, on a local resident's webcam. Within hours, it was being played on virtually every television news show in the country and was also distributed to millions on the Web.