The sun revolves around the earth. The world is flat. Cigarettes aren't bad for you. And we all need to be spending more on social media marketing.

"What is more interactive: a coloring-in sheet on a McDonald's tray table or a Web banner?" That was the (rhetorical) question a planner I used to work with once posed and it really stuck with me, especially when looking at the utterly dismal portfolio of online creative back in the day.

Your titles may not represent it, but almost everyone in the marketing industry is now a data scientist of some kind. From media and account management all the way down to creative and project management, data permeates everything we do, and very few decisions are made without first looking at the numbers.

With Gartner predicting that the CMO will spend more time on IT than the CIO by 2017, some companies have been eager to adopt a chief digital officer (CDO) role in an effort to manage and accelerate digital transformation.But is appointing a CDO a bad idea?

"Matt, will you write me a recommendation so I can go to business school? I want to get my MBA," my colleague Katie Bronnenkant asked me a few years ago. "Why do you need an MBA? You work in media," I said dismissively.

I screwed up this week. I sent an email that started like this: "So, I was a little bored on the plane..." and then went on to request comments on a report I had drafted. The email went out to five people, all directly involved in the report. Nobody replied.

Telling folks heavily invested in the status quo that their world has changed overnight in surprising ways -- and that they need to change with it -- is no easy task. It's even tougher when the changes these folks need to implement are risky, in uncharted waters with no proven industry best practices to follow. It's tougher yet when those folks pay you a lot of money to represent their interests, including predicting future market conditions, and the changes that occurred surprised nearly everyone, happening faster and differently than you had told them they would. Sound familiar? Welcome to the …

Does the development of a real-time marketing culture deliver true value to brands, or does it create an opportunity that sacrifices quality in favor of relevance? On our panel this week at OMMA RTB, we discussed the idea of real-time bidding (RTB) driving a real-time marketing culture, and the give and take associated with that dichotomy.

At face value, customer satisfaction polling is a great thing. As a customer, I try to respond to as many satisfaction surveys as possible. But this month's volume of satisfaction surveys has been overwhelming.

Like many companies today, our startup operates as a series of distributed (or virtual) teams. Our product team is in Brooklyn, while our sales and marketing team operates in Manhattan. We have found that if we let engineers and product designers work in Brooklyn, not only are they more likely to accept our offer employment, the current employees are then able to recruit other creative thinkers to the cause.