I envy a good salesperson. A good salesperson is an entire set of specific skills and some unique personality traits all rolled into one enviable package. You have to be able to read people and understand their motivations, and be smart enough to customize your pitch to them based on their motivations. You also have to be confident enough to hear "no" quite a lot, even multiple times from the same person who may eventually say "yes."

I'm in a new marketing leadership role, and am quickly building the team. I prefer to hire proven stars that I've worked with before. Their probability of success is higher, and you cheat time by avoiding the laborious recruiting process, while activating someone intimate with your playbook. When hiring former star colleagues is not possible, I scrutinize potential hires based on 10 criteria, no matter the role. These criteria do a good job of surfacing truth to make a good decision in the least amount of time:

Given the demand for engineers and salespeople, recruiting plays an essential role in the media and technology industry. Finding great people can be difficult, and recruiters can help. But there are some recruiters - especially the younger, more aggressive tech recruiters - who act unprofessionally. Here are some examples:

Have you ever tried Mailchimp? It's pretty awesome, right? It feels good to use: the clean interface, the sensible reports, the cheeky copy ("Prepare for launch! You're about to send a campaign... This is your moment of glory.") Mailchimp is one of the most widely used email service provider around, and they've always had a quirky, delightful approach to both their product and their service. A few years back I logged in to see a message that they wanted to send me a T-shirt, randomly, for no reason. That's the kind of thing they do, but not on autopilot -- …

The history of advertising has been one of delegation, trust and evaluation by intermediate metrics. In these areas, advertising's past will not define its future.

A number of people have been asking me lately about the evolution of display media buying. The fact is that when you look at where things were and compare it to where things are going, you see a distinct story that portends the future of advertising very clearly.

It's critical for company leaders to understand and simplify complex problems and then determine long-term goals and plans for addressing them. Long-term context is challenging, though short-term minutiae can be equally daunting. That's why I've adopted a simple framework in which I codify critical goals and milestones for the week ahead. It's really a one-page manifesto for the week, to help prioritize actions and tempo, track progress toward goals and communicate. I publish it weekly in a Google shared doc, and share it with immediate colleagues. Without it, I feel naked. Components include:

The market for salespeople, account managers and engineers is so fierce today that recruiters, startups and established companies are all trying to attract the best talent. How will you retain your top performers in the face of such competition? The key is to build a culture and process that naturally repels your competitors. Here are 10 steps for building a company that can retain its top employees:

Last week, we spoke about the Federal Reserve and the challenges that exist when financial trades are happening in milliseconds. But the financial markets aren't the only arena suffering from an overemphasis on speed. Ever since Oreo won the Super Bowl(well, the advertising aspect of it, anyway), marketers have gotten in a tizzy of excitement over the idea of responding in real time. A fair amount has already been said about how inappropriate, ineffective, and crass real-time marketing -- aka "RTM" -- can be. So I figured, instead of saying we shouldn't do RTM, we should talk about the right …

I had the pleasure of beginning my marketing career pre-Internet. Well, I think floppy disks and 4-color VGA monitors existed back in South Africa circa-1992/1993 (we were a little behind the rest of the world), but for the most part "you've got mail" was still a phrase reserved for the one job that surely would never be under threat: the mailman. Today, the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, where the word "analog" is essentially verboten and a swear word and the 30-second spot is pretty much dead and buried (but don't go telling that to those still buying …