I hear lots of people in our industry ask the same question about ad technology sales: What challenges do you face getting your clients to understand your offering? As I was thinking through an intelligent response, I realized the answer sounded too familiar to my gripes with politics. Let me explain

I'm writing on Tuesday morning, Oct. 30, from my home office in Westchester County, New York, only a few blocks from Long Island Sound. I surveyed the town in my Jeep Wrangler and saw downed trees and loose power lines everywhere.

In the world of startups, the term "mafia" has come to positively describe a group of people who have built a successful company and then continued to work together to create a new wave of startups. As Sarah Lacy, founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily, the Silicon Valley-based publisher, recently put it: "In the case of the strongest and most enduring mafias, the sum of these distributed but connected ventures - influenced by heavy lessons from a shared past - wind up being larger than the original company that spawned it all."

There is a Tom Fishburne cartoon from 2008 called "Poser Marketing." It depicts a can of soda, brand unrecognizable, anthropomorphized with arms, legs and a face. There are three hipster-looking youngsters sitting in the corner. "Fine," declares Soda Can Guy, "You win! I give up trying to interrupt you with TV ads you stubbornly refuse to watch. You can be my Myspace friend or watch my YouTube videos instead." The hipsters are unmoved; only one of them bothers to offer a reply: "Whatever, loser."

Today I would like to introduce you to Jack Smith, our chief product officer at Simulmedia. He'll tell us about the conference he thinks is so important: The Strata Conference + Hadoop World, which show how the role of technology, science and big data will forever alter the makeup of marketing organizations.

The medium is still maturing. There currently is a lack of proven brand case studies, and as a result there are more direct-response advertisers driving CPC or CPA ad models than there are CPM-driven brand advertisers. The ad formats are still in flux, and the growth rate for consumer use is so steep that standard metrics for success are almost obsolete by the time they are published.

I love maritime history. I love how ships and the sea so heavily influenced the world around us. And they still do. Maritime nonfiction satisfies my craving for a time when men were really men -- not softies like most men today, with their smartphones, tablet computers, paper cuts, cushy chairs, cubicles, facial lotions and pedicures. My latest haunting read was "Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World," by Joan Druett. It's a gripping story, and it underscores important lessons in leadership for today as well.

While at MEC, the global media agency, I ran the media business for retailer L.L. Bean. One of the most effective parts of our campaigns were the "retargeted" ad banners that we would serve to people who had previously been to the retailer's web site. This was similar to sending more catalogs to frequent buyers -- a technique that L.L. Bean had mastered. Back then, though, the scale of retargeting was limited -- you could only target those people who had been to your site. The process was also limited by the number of banners that could be created. It …

Thirty-seven years ago, my mother started teaching cooking classes in our kitchen. Thirty-five years ago, she formed what has become the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts; I sit on its advisory board. Last month, one of the graduates started a Facebook group for alumni. Within a week, more than 1,000 people had joined. This, of course, is a dream scenario, notwithstanding the fact that it took 37 years to create the overnight success. It is the best possible intersection of brand and social media: where people engage with you not because you are offering a special deal, …

Late last week, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo discussed the company's growing role not just in how people consume traditional media's entertainment and news, but how they interact and share their experiences and opinions surrounding it. A number of commentators have advanced the themes touched on in the interview, suggesting that Twitter is fast becoming the de facto leader in the race to be television's "second screen" -- a companion role that many hardware, software and Web services companies are currently chasing.