Last Friday was a sad day. A very dear and lifelong friend of mine, my Uncle Al, passed away. And so I did what I've done before on these occasions. I expressed my feelings by writing about it. The post went live on my blog around 10:30 in the morning. By mid-afternoon, it had been shared and posted through Facebook, Twitter and many other online channels. Many were kind enough to send comments. The family, in the midst of their grief, forwarded my post to their family and friends. Soon, there was an extended network of mourning that sought to …

Facebook is the truly big thing if you're after teens. As an advertising medium, Facebook is also No. 1 in social media ad spend, commanding 71% of the total -- which translates to 24% of all display advertising, according to eMarketer's December 2014 report. So Facebook is No. 1 by a long mile. But to me this data is highly incomplete and therefore irrelevant.

We've got odd names for things at the moment. I tried to make a phone call from my mobile phone the other day and it took me a good few swipes to find the one icon I needed to make a phone call. And yet we call it a mobile phone. It won't be long before we look at our TVs the same way. What was once a single-purpose device to watch TV shows from TV companies, arranged by TV channels, with TV ads, will be as badly named as a mobile phone is today. It's this world, where the …

What does it take to hire a successful CMO in today's marketing economy? Answering that question is not easy because the environment keeps changing, but there are some key qualities essential for the person leading your marketing.

As I discussed last week, if I mention a brand to you -- like Nike, for instance -- your brain immediately pulls back your own interpretation of the brand. What has happened, in a split second, is that the activation of that one node -- let's call it the Nike node -- triggers the activation of several related nodes in your brain, which is quickly assembled into a representation of the brand Nike. This is called spreading activation.

The "haters" are the doomsday scenario fans that have declared TV dead, and long live digital! Then there are the TV-hater contrarians, who argue that TV is still a formidable medium in terms of reach, penetration, ability to engage, etc. I am not a TV hater. I am a realist. My issues are these:

I have swallowed the red pill of reality. For the past four-and-a-half days, I've been bombarded by insanely skilled academics with a tsunami of information that will, henceforth, color the way I look at the world -- and should, I believe, color the way you do, too.

There is no question that data and digital approaches are going to reshape the future of the TV advertising industry. Just look at the headlines this past week. Nielsen, the TV measurement company, is buying eXelate, a digital ad data management platform. Comcast is rumored to be buying AudienceExpress, an automated TV ad-buying platform. So it sounds as if the TV ad business is on a slippery, data-driven, audience-based digital slope headed to an inglorious commoditized future like online display, with falling CPMs, where content-driven adjacency and brands have largely been kicked to the curb, doesn't it?

How broad is the definition of a "digital experience" in today's world? Will my kids remember how quaint this era of digital is compared to what they'll see when they're older?

"Beatle." I have just primed you. Before you even finished reading the word above, you had things popping into your mind. Perhaps it was a mental image of an individual Beatle: either John, Paul, George or Ringo. Perhaps it was a snippet of song. Perhaps it was grainy black-and-white footage of the group's first Ed Sullivan show appearance. But as the concept "Beatle" entered your working memory, your brain was hard at work retrieving what you believed were relevant concepts from your long-term memory. (By the way, if your reaction was "What's a Beatle?" -- substitute "Imagine Dragons.")