For a very long time, marketers developed strategies to achieve marketing objectives like awareness, perception and efficiency. The pendulum shifted recently, with marketers now starting to take a more significant seat at the C-level table, realizing that marketing metrics are not necessarily as important as standard business metrics -- though marketing measures do provide a bridge to meet standard ones. And now the ultimate accountability for marketing is revenue and sales. Today's marketers understand addressability and accountability, and if they don't then they're destined to be replaced.

Well, hello, brand marketers out there. It's time to shut the door in the face of the Grinch who stole your media budget. It's time to celebrate that you made it to the end of the year (albeit with a few bumps and bruises). Be thankful you survived the umpteenth reorg and restructuring, budget cut, CMO and/or agency firing/hiring.

In case you missed it, last Friday was World Television Day. And it was not brought to you by Toyota or McDonald's, NBC or even NPR. No, this was a United Nations-led initiative backed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the Association of Commercial Television (ACT) and egta, the Brussels-based association of television and radio sales houses. Regular readers of this column know that I am frequently critical of the role TV today plays as an advertising medium. But why not celebrate TV once a year? Let's face it, TV is and probably continues to be an incredibly powerful medium, …

It's Twitter founder Biz Stone's latest venture: Super, an app designed to let people speak their minds. "It's loud, it's bright, and we think you'll dig it," they say in the FAQ. It is, of course, well-designed. It's got Bill Murray on the homepage, which is almost unfairly awesome. There's a virtual certainty that Super will gain some measure of success, depending largely on how you define such things.

It may seem a bit like piling on, but I think that it's finally time for the TV industry to change the way audience and ads are measured, bought and sold. Its measurement is broken and needs to be fixed. Just this past week, quite uncharacteristically, even Nielsen made a case for fixing things.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" -- for salespeople. I should actually rephrase that to "they were the best of tactics, they were the worst of tactics," because there are some pretty poor tactics employed by salespeople these days, which is funny given all the tools and insights available to them.

What, exactly, makes a digital ad creepy? This is a question many people would prefer to ignore, instead abandoning social media or even the Internet altogether. (It's easy to fear what you don't understand, and easier still to run from what you fear.) But as the CEO of a data-centric ad tech company, thinking about this is one of the most important responsibilities I have.

I always say that it is good to have science fiction and science facts. You need science fiction to dream about what might be possible -- but ultimately, science facts rule and help to frame your understanding.

"I'm just going to step over here, where she can't see me," says Academy Award-winner Mark Sagar, walking off to the side of the stage. "Now it's like I've abandoned her." On the big screen, the baby starts to look around, worry growing on her chubby face. After a few moments, her eyes fill with tears. 700 people emit a spontaneous, "Awww!" Mark jumps back into frame. "Don't worry, darling! I'm here. Everything's OK." The baby calms down.

At a Paley Center for Media event this week, I listened to CNN anchor Brian Stelter probe Jason Hirschhorn on why he started MediaREDEF-- the daily media roundup that is fast becoming indispensable to people in our industry -- and where he was taking it next. I began to wonder if I was listening to the answer to a question that I wonder about quite a bit: "What will the new bundle be?"