What's a better way to win a game? Is it the game where you grind it out and get one run at a time, in a heated battle with the opposing team that depends on fast pick-off moves to first, and finessed bunts to advance the runners? Is it the low scoring game, maybe 2-2 in the ninth, and your best player drives a deep fly ball to center field that drives the fielder to the warning track, only to be crushed when they see the ball fly into the stands, ending the game with a bang from a bases-loaded …

While everyone gets excited over "native advertising," the challenge remains that nobody can agree exactly on what it is -- or isn't. Or if it's something that has existed for a long time -- or hasn't. Not only has the term native advertising become a cliche, its frequent usage to describe the indescribable has made hearing it somewhat tiring. Regardless, there is a tactical component of "native advertising" that most industry executives agree is real: advertising in feeds, or "in-feed advertising." Thanks to years of constant emails and of ubiquitous adoption of smartphones, we've been conditioned with short attention spans …

Until recently, I sold products based on the relationships that I had formed during career in media and advertising. Agencies like GroupM, OMG and Starcom Mediavest were accessible to me because of the people I knew and the people they knew. I took pride in the fact that I could sell products based solely on my connections. I don't think that way anymore.

In November 2010, the then-26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg sounded the death knell for email. Email was too slow, he said, and too formal. The youths don't like it. What they would like, apparently, was Facebook's new messaging service. This magic system would work with email, direct messages, and texts so that people communicated through a single channel, yet used whatever method they chose. Nothing like an upstart billionaire attacking a venerable institution to spawn a media frenzy. Was the service going to be a Gmail killer? Was email at death's door, or had it actually crossed the threshold into the hereafter? …

Yesterday MediaPost published a story about media ecologist Jack Myers' prediction that Web-like, audience-based advertising could represent the majority of the TV ad market by 2020, as the TV and digital video ad ecosystems converge. In online, if only one of a 1,000 impressions yields a response and sale, the revenue of the sale easily justifies the costs of the 999 impressions that didn't, since online media impressions are so cheap. Of course, while marketers might not care much about the "non-yielding" ads, that don't impact them economically, the folks receiving those irrelevant impressions certainly do - and their response …

Today's businesses are experiencing significant levels of change in the face of data. What tends to get overlooked, however, is that the face of data is actually a real human being. People provide feedback that's valuable for your business success.

Last week Forrester Research published a report criticizing Facebook for its shortcomings to marketers. It was countered quickly by many leaders and journalists in the marketing community, who criticized the analysis, methodology and tone -- such as fellow Spinster Joseph Jaffe, Matt Owen of Econsultancy, Andrea Huspeni in Entrepreneur, and Rick Munarriz in USA Today, among others. Contrary to the Forrester report, the fact is that marketers are placing more faith and investment in the world's largest social networking platform. This was evidenced most recently by Facebook's strong quarterly earnings report.

One of my favorite Mediapost articles ever written is "The Power of No" by Dave Morgan. In it, Dave describes how the word "no" can be useful in business: "Learning how and when to use the word is a vital lesson. This is true whether you are in sales, client service or product development. It's particularly true in start-up companies, where resources are scarce, historical guidance is short, and making too many promises is devastatingly more dangerous than making too few." Another important aspect to the "power of no" is how you handle being on the other side of the …

Imagine for a moment that you are a magician. You have worked hard to become an expert in your craft: making bunnies disappear, sawing ladies in half, reaching your hand through a glass display case to grab a watch. People are awed by your performances. They have no idea how you do it. They want more. Thinking you are capable of anything, they start making unreasonable requests: Walk on water! Through a brick wall! Jump out of a plane with no parachute! You begin to resist. Just because you can levitate a few inches doesn't mean you can fly.