"How can I be helpful to you? Let me know now or in the future." I always try to end conversations that way. It's not just a saying, it's a state of mind.

In my book "Z.E.R.O.," I make several references and extend several metaphors to weight -- and specifically obesity. It's a particular passion point of mine, a cause I identify with strongly for a bunch of personal reasons. I draw a parallel to our media industry in danger of collapsing under its own girth. Later in the book, I talk about marketer lethargy, inertia and inactivity with a very direct call-to-action: Hey fatso, time to hit the gym! It's a bit of tough love connected to our industry's own epidemic, namely the inability to break bad habits, get out of our …

Remember when there was no such thing as a Like? If you're looking for a successful and cost-effective Facebook strategy in 2014, you need to focus on fans. Here's why:

Audience cherry-picking and cherry-packaging is coming to TV this upfront season. Two weeks ago at NATPE in Miami, both Group M's Irwin Gotlieb and Initiative's Kris Magel told us that their media buying shops are moving aggressively to leverage consumer viewing and purchase databases to buy and re-aggregate fragmented audiences on TV -- just as their agencies do on the Web.

For the very first time, brands, rather than direct-response advertisers, are driving innovation in the digital marketing category. DR advertisers have historically taken this role, as they're always on the lookout for new ways to drive down costs, increase performance and create efficiency that scales. DR advertisers were the first to adopt search advertising, the first to push rich media and the first to make the shift into programmatic advertising. DR advertisers love to be at the forefront, but recently I've noticed brand advertisers are the ones pushing toward the concept of the enterprise marketing stack, and brand advertisers are …

According to Nielsen, some "drop off" in ad memorability is expected between the first and second halves of a Super Bowl game (10% average from 2009-2013). However, this year's Super Bowl XLVIII blowout countered that trend, with ad performance down only 7% during the game's Seahawks-Destroy-Broncos second half. Nielsen also reported that only 5% of the audience tuned out for the final half-hour of the game. I don't believe this was a random event, or caused by Mother Nature. My theory is that tv ad execution, combined with early social promotion, was partly responsible, and this phenomenon will continue in …

One of the contentions my co-author and fellow Online Media Spinner Joseph Jaffe and I are making is that "The Big One" is coming -- or, actually, has arrived. The big "what," you ask? We refer to a series of developments, each in itself so disruptive it could and should drive marketers and their ecosystem to pursue innovation in how they connect with consumers as priority number one, two and three. Think about digital everything and everywhere, TV and campaign-centric marketing in a consumer-centric era, big data as a potentially very beneficial marketing tool vs. big data as a government …

You may have heard that Twitter's share price is down. Apparently, annual revenues of $665 million -- an increase of 110% over the previous year -- aren't enough to keep investors happy. Point, Facebook, which can finally relax a little now that its share price is significantly higher than its IPO value, after spending well over a year beneath it. Twitter might be facing a tough week, but these two companies still tend to dominate the media conversation about digital platforms. And yet neither of these two even make the list when it comes to share of digital ad spend …

TV "impressions" are 100% of the screen for 30 seconds. I promised you 10 words for why TV dollars won't go online, and there they are.

Marketers love to evaluate demographics, and one of the most common ways they track consumers is based on age: "Young people like this, but old people like that." Age is an easy way to evaluate consumers, but I don't think it's actually the most accurate.