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?"

There are two movies I, and probably most people around my age, quote when referring to marketing and sales: "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Boiler Room." "Glengarry" gets quoted more often, so I decided to focus on only one analogy from that movie to discuss the marketer's role in this retail-heavy period of the year. The ultimate rule of "Glengarry" is A-B-C: Always Be Closing.

Recently, an article entitled "Peak Google" lit up Twitter, postulating that the business of search advertising, while not dying, is likely to be surpassed by an adjacent industry -- and soon. Why? As the author, Ben Thompson, points out, many of the most disruptive events in tech over the last couple decades have been made not by direct competitors, but by "eclipsing" businesses that tipped markets away from the incumbents. Speculating on the next big tech industry shift, Thompson theorizes that money funneled into search giants like Google will soon plateau, while money dedicated to "in-stream" ads will continue to …

If you think about it, marketers today simply can’t win when making a smart decision about where to place their ad budgets. TV used to be the steady rock in the marketer’s relationship with advertising: sizeable, trusted and to a degree predictable. But the once-steady rock today has many real and a few perceived flaws chipping away at its role in the media mix. Enough with the rock metaphors; allow me to explain. Despite the industry’s solid belief in GRPs, TV advertising is historically a medium with thin and crude measurement at its base. I have alluded in earlier posts …