The other day I was out with my friend Sam. Sam is a very busy guy. He is, shall we say, "in demand." People tend to want a piece of him. While we were out, I took a photo. I added a caption and posted it to Facebook. As soon as it finished uploading, Sam's phone pinged. "Oh, yeah," he says, "Your status updates push to my phone. Every time you post, I get a notification."

"Twinkies and Ding Dongs are back from the dead," according to a New York Times' DealBook post. But I wonder whether we should instead be celebrating "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead," and letting sleeping (or dead) dogs lie. Still, I am fascinated by the products' rebirth -- which, if you think about it, could be both seminal and precedent-setting for resolving several key debates swirling right now in the marketing world:

I read in USA Today this week a report detailing the top-10 most-visited websites based on time spent, with Facebook at the top of the heap. It's not a surprise that Facebook led the list, but the numbers behind the numbers are very interesting when you break them down from the perspective of an Internet veteran.

The highlight of my SXSW experience was Chris Anderson's interview with Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, co-founder of Tesla Motors and PayPal, and chairman of SolarCity. Anderson probed a wide range of topics, including Musk's entrepreneurial ambitions in space exploration, solar power and transportation innovation -- even battling New York Times auto critics in the court of public opinion. Without a doubt, Musk's intelligence, confidence and ambition is superhuman. He shared a few perspectives and gems of wisdom that stuck with me.

While building the next Facebook or Google may be a worthy goal, the best possible outcome for many venture-backed startups is to be acquired by a larger company. In a sense, the entire startup ecosystem - founders, venture capitalists, lawyers and other service providers - forms a kind of ad hoc research and development lab for bigger companies. Given the importance of being acquired, you would think founders would spend some of their time optimizing their startup for this outcome. Surprisingly, though, many founders don't think about this eventuality because they don't want to get distracted from building the product.

I sit across from a man with that most optimistic and daunting of titles: Community Manager. He looks haunted. Dark circles under his eyes speak of late nights pinning and tweeting and tagging. A tremor echoes through his fragile voice as he describes the thousands of sites he scans regularly in order to maintain his position of thought leadership. At the same time, an expression of despair accompanies his realization that it will never be enough.

Real-time bidding (RTB) has had a massive impact on the online display ad market. Billions of dollars worth of online ad impressions are bought and sold "programmatically" on exchanges through RTB systems on an annual basis today. RTB is certainly the fastest-growing sector in digital marketing -- and, given the extraordinary efficiency it brings to the buying and selling process, many expect it to swallow up more and more of the market over the next few years. Do I think RTB is going to come to TV at scale anytime soon? No way! Here's why not:

I spent a lot of years on the agency side -- probably too many, to be honest. It took me a while to be interested enough to get truly entrenched in "the valley," as it's known -- but I now have a much deeper understanding for the tech side of "ad tech" than I previously did. In doing so, I've come to recognize the sea change that's taking place: how our industry is finally ready to launch into the enterprise phase, being serviced by enterprise solutions in much the same way as the rest of business has for years.

It's been seven years since I last attended SXSW. So much has changed since then! As adoption of Twitter, Facebook, and smartphones has exploded, so have the numbers of marketers and interactive professionals who attend SXSW. I now find myself paying over $800 per night for a hotel suite, which I'm sharing with colleagues. SXSW should consider changing its business model by giving away event tickets and simply taxing Austin housing providers.

"After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today." In one of the most honest resignation letters in the history of CEO resignation letters, last week Andrew Mason signed off after four tumultuous years as the CEO of Groupon, the daily deals company that he founded. Mason handled a difficult situation well, admitting to serious errors in running the business and hoping that his departure would pave the way toward the company's turnaround.