Two years ago in this column, I wrote about billionaire Russian entrepreneur Evgeny Kasperskyand his concerns about democracy in the age of the Digital Native. To quote myself paraphrasing Kaspersky: "...[O]ne task that we really should be able to accomplish online is voting. But the security specifications for voting are significantly higher than those for Twitter, and if we can't meet those specs -- and, as of now, we can't -- there's not much point in allowing it to happen online.

Our industry could spend its time trying to wrangle the collection and valuation of a massive number of different media output metrics -- like making sense of TV GRPs and print pages in the face of banner impressions, search queries, social likes and tweets. Or we can shift our energies from the media outputs, which are proxies, to their provable contributions to clients' business outcomes. In fact, we as an industry must focus on the business outcomes sought by marketers, whether it is the generation of leads, driving traffic to stores, or sales of products.

Are you the smartest person in the room at work? If you answer "yes" to that question, you might need to rethink how you operate in business. Humility is a very overlooked personality trait in business, but it's probably one of the most important characteristics that can lead you to success. I'm not saying you can't have an ego or take pride in your work -- you should have both. It's more about finding the balance between your ego and your willingness to learn.

Last week, many publications predicted that the "holy grail" of digital advertising would soon be within reach. The truth is, the pursuit of advertising's holy grail is only just beginning.

I was in Athens, Greece last week. I am not telling you this to make you jealous, as the reason for my trip was not to enjoy a lavish holiday but to spend time with the media, digital and procurement teams from a very large global firm. I was lucky enough to join the team on Sunday night, when we visited the iconic Acropolis with its famous buildings the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion and the temple of Athena Nike. Inspired by Greek mythology, I then had a dream about marketing mythology. I dreamed about Apollo and his battle with …

In 1961, Ray Kroc bought a small restaurant chain from the McDonald brothers. The rest, as they say, is history: the exponential expansion, the investments in real estate that made the parent company so financially successful, the rigid systems and processes -- including forced revolution of the potato-growing industry -- that ensure every Mickey D's French fry from Finland to Fiji tastes identical.

There's a lot of talk about redefining what is considered to be "TV" in this fast-changing media landscape. That brings up an important issue: If we're redefining what television is at every turn, still, from what I can tell, the industry isn't rushing to redefine the advertising that supports TV-quality content. As TV evolves, sticking traditional commercials on digital platforms is just going to look more dissonant than ever.

Wow. Where did the time go!! It's already October, and Q4 is here. I feel as if it was just yesterday when things were gearing up for summer. There was a sense of optimism as the sun came out, the snow melted and the winter weather wore off. Things were looking up for the tech sector! That changed a bit when we saw a couple of missed IPOs and some ad-tech fails. Now things are slightly more pessimistic, which suits me just fine. This business seems to prevail better when the odds are stacked against it. I

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 …