Apples, honey and racism. Two of them go together. One does not. Need a hint? I'll give you another set of three words: football (soccer), social media and racism. Two of them go together. One does not. Can you guess which one?

I recently delivered a keynote in Amsterdam at SpotOnTV2014, the Dutch association of TV sales houses. Obviously, many speakers represented TV networks or TV sales organizations, and therefore many were quite positive about the general state of TV as a platform and as a business. And they have every reason to be happy in The Netherlands. The networks have maintained their relative share of consumer time spent with media, and TV budgets are looking a little healthier again after a deep recession. Here in the U.S., times are also pretty good if you're in the TV biz. The danger, is …

Last week, my MediaPost colleague Catharine Taylor wrote a post wondering why CMOs aren't that social. In response, another MediaPost colleague, Maarten Albarda, suggested that nobody cares, that it doesn't matter whether CMOs are on social media, and who can even name the Starbucks CMO, anyway? If there's one thing I've learned in my years on the Internet, it's that if two people are disagreeing online, the most productive course of action is to wade right in with your own overblown opinion. So here I am.

We are a society that measures everything we do, and size truly does matter. Last week saw the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It's BIGGER, faster, and the screen might even be stronger. Apple sold 10 million of these bad boys in three days. If the iPhone came out with the new software but in the same size as its predecessors, everyone would have been disappointed. The truth is, simply put, we like 'em BIG (our phones, of course).

Permutation, correlation. causation: These are the new vocabulary words for today's marketing leaders. Four years ago, you needed to hire someone to understand what your digital marketing data meant. That's because digital and all the valuable insight it has to provide about how your consumers see, internalize and interact with your brand was becoming something you needed to understand. But you're not a freshman anymore. This is now a varsity game.

I wanted to react to Catharine Taylor's recent column about the lack of social media activity by CMOs. She refers to Infegy's list of the Top 50 most social CMOs in 2014, as measured by number of retweets, interactions, shares and so on. Catherine is not impressed by the fact that only nine of the Top 50 CMOs are from Fortune 50 companies. In other words, CMOs from big, well-known companies are absent in social media. But I say: Who cares?

For the past three years, I've been attending an annual unconference here in New Zealand: an event with no pre-set agenda, no keynote speakers, no topics declared in advance. It is entirely designed by its attendees. On arrival, the walls are covered with gridded sheets of paper indicating available rooms and session times; when we're given the cue by the organizer, we run a kind of organic, self-determining scrum, putting Post-its on the wall to co-create the schedule.

There is a limited amount of human attention in the world. Every day the same amount of attention is created (number of people multiplied by number of conscious hours). Everything meaningful in life requires attention. Laughing, crying, learning. Everything. And we humans consider our attention precious, because we know we have a finite amount of it. Yet somehow the advertising industry developed the notion that it either A) does not need people's attention, or B) can simply create more attention. Both assumptions are obviously ridiculous, but in order to keep passing money around, the industry seems to have just taken …

Marketers are not scientists or magicians, but they are quickly spearheading the journey from the unknown into the known. Let me explain.

I was keynoting at a Satmetrix (the Net Promoter People) customer experience conference last week in London -- and over fish 'n chips during lunch, I ended up chatting with one of my fellow keynoters, Ian Williams (@CustExpMan), about making mistakes. Ian had a rather controversial point of view that organizations should go out of their way to make mistakes ON PURPOSE.