Back in 2009, I attended a conference called X Media Lab, designed for startups in the creative and tech industries. At the time, I was the CMO of a startup virtual world for kids. On the opening day, we got to have 20-minute sessions with a few of the speakers, to get their input on our fledgling companies. We sat down with a guy named Nat Torkington, who's been involved with the Web since it was born. "Go check out Startup Lessons Learned," he advised us. "You guys need to start using a lean methodology."

Everybody is talking about native advertising as the future, but it's a meaningless term that spans two totally different concepts. How about we define it properly?

Data can be intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. The fact is, most marketers were trained in marketing, which is more akin to psychology than it is to economics or mathematics. That was the case until the last few years. Now marketers are being tasked to be psychologists as well as mathematicians, technologists, statisticians and more. Pretty much the only job we don't have to do is technical development -- but just you wait, because that can't be far behind.

Google is possibly the most interesting company in the world right now. But being interesting does not necessarily equate with being successful. And therein lies the rub.

In the olden days, marketing consisted of 4 Ps (Place, Price, Promotion and, of course, Product). This approach made perfect sense, as each P defined a critical part of what ultimately made a product sell. And that really has not changed much in today's world.

The world has changed, they said. Creative industries have been democratized, they said. There are no more gatekeepers, they said. I call bullshit.

The Super Bowl is the only event that reaches a national (even international) audience with a single, point-of-moment impact. This year's game was amazing, the half-time show was awesome and the ads were great. Enough has been written about all of that. I want to talk about the trend I saw woven through all of these elements: the trend of positive, open, genuine emotion. I have to say, it's about time!

It's long been thought that academia provides a refuge from the sordid world of business. But when a Nobel Prize-winning academic says that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't publish, you know something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Laureate Peter Higgs (the physicist of Higgs boson fame) told The Guardian: "Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

No, I did not watch the Super Bowl. I have actually never, ever watched the Super Bowl. To help you understand why the Super Bowl is just a cultural challenge too far for me as a Johnny Foreigner, I refer to John Oliver's brilliant explanation on David Letterman's show last week.