Last week, on a Facebook Page I manage, I posted a link about a woman talking down a gunman to save a schoolful of elementary kids. It got two likes.. A colleague posted a link about the kiwibird being a direct descendant of the T-Rex. It got 24 likes. I posted the above observation on my personal profile. Nobody was surprised, although some did try to justify it.

The announced merger between Omnicom and Publicis has sparked a very constructive debate in our industry about how major players in the ad industry must significantly improve their ability to leverage data in this digital, global, Internet-driven age. To be clear, I don't think that big data is really going to play a significant role in the merger. You don't need to be big to leverage big data; quite the opposite. The notion of big data is really about the newfound availability, to companies of all sizes, of massive volumes of highly valuable, unstructured data being thrown off from all …

There's a meme right now: what makes New York and/or the Bay Area either great or miserable for the media business. Lots of people are writing about it and even the Monday Spin by Matt Straz took a stab at it (nice article, Matt!), so who am I to not take a pass at touting the wonderfulness that is San Francisco and the Bay Area? Here are 10 things that make the Bay Area great(er) than everywhere else for the media and interactive industries:

Buzzwords like "big data" and "data-driven marketing" could make you believe that marketing leadership has been taken over by robots -- logical and dispassionate. To be sure, data and science are foundational and should form a marketing framework. But what about feelings? According to a growing body of neurological science, emotional impulses should not be ignored in business situations.

Despite the growth of its tech companies, New York is still largely Mediatown. Seventy percent of all U.S. advertising is still bought and sold here. There are at least 10 things that make New York's media industry great, including:

The finest book I've ever read on how to behave on social media was first published in 1936. It covers everything: customer relationships, brand management, engagement, outreach, and more. Of course, it wasn't meant to address these topics. It simply couldn't help itself. The book is "How To Win Friends And Influence People," by Dale Carnegie.

Last month I addressed a room filled with some of the country's most elite marketers at an ANA Digital and Social Media conference. I spoke about innovation -- specifically, experimenting with early stage startups across the entire innovation continuum (digital, social, mobile, emerging.) To that endI challenged the audience to iproject themselves to Dec. 31, 2013. I asked them what they accomplished in the 6 months between "now" and "then." What one new thing did they implement or execute? What did they do differently? What truly original, creative, disruptive and/or innovative act did they perform?

"I want to be where everybody knows my name. And they're always glad I came..." Not only is this the paraphrased refrain from one of the greatest television shows of all time, but it's also the basis for great customer service.

Remember the analog wristwatch? Thanks to the smartphone, I stopped wearing a wristwatch regularly many years ago. With the dominance of smartphones as timekeepers and growing excitement about smartwatches, now is an excellent time to rediscover the benefits and precision of analog wristwatches for doing their core job: simply, telling time.

It's true that millions of dollars of investment have been poured into companies that were not ready to deliver on the growth that they promised. The result has been that some founders have gotten the axe -- and, in the worst-case scenarios, companies have been shut down. There are a number of reasons for this, including: