It's a climate commitment milestone. Earlier this week, 13 large corporations announced that they would collectively be committing $140 billion toward climate change mitigation. The commitments take various forms, from reducing emissions to shifting to renewable energy to increasing investment in renewable technology or other environmental initiatives. And the companies range broadly: Coca-Cola. Berkshire Hathaway. Wal-Mart. UPS. Bank of America.

It's amazing how many things we don't question, how many critical assumptions powerfully shape the world around us that are based on muscle memory and reasons that we forget no longer exist.

In a world where we're all running a million miles an hour, it's incredible how little attention we pay to how we speak. Sadly, we've begun to lose the art of spoken language. I think the worst example of this trend is the increasing use of what some people call "lazy fillers" in speech.

I confess - I poked the bear a little last week with my post "Is Brand Strategy A Myth?" Not too much. Just a little. I purposely oversimplified one side of an argument to set up a debate. I knew there would be those who would swing to the other side in defense of strategy.

For a few years, media agency group Havas has published an annual index of "Meaningful Brands." The index measures if consumers could see themselves living without brands X, Y or Z. Turns out they can. And also without A, B, C and pretty much the rest of the alphabet. The 2015 edition of Meaningful Brands in fact reveals that in the U.S., only 5% of brands would truly be missed by consumers. Other regions of the world fare a little better because apparently brand trust in general is much higher there. So globally about 75% of brands would not be …

My favorite new MediaPost publication is the IoT (Internet of Things) Daily. They haven't asked me to talk about this at all; I promise. But it's so cool. It's the one talking about all the bright shiny things, like residents at a senior community wearing sensors so they don't go wandering off, or a male grooming service adding virtual reality to its offering. On Wednesday, though, there was a headline that really stopped me in my tracks. Or rather, a headline about somebody stopping something in its tracks: the specific someone being hackers, and the thing they stopped in its …

Yes, it's true. Electricity is poised to be the biggest ad medium in 2016 -- more than TV, Internet, radio and digital place-based media combined. Amazingly, this trend seems to have come out of nowhere. Of course this is a ridiculous headline, and calling electricity an ad medium is a silly way to compare various media to each other.

Over the last few months, I've sat in multiple meetings with Fortune 100 brands discussing data and digital advertising. On multiple occasions I've heard brand execs explain how they're using digital as an increasingly important piece of their media mix, in some cases spending as much as 25%-30% of their budgets for digital. They detail how they're using search coupled with display, alongside video and in some cases incentive-based affiliate efforts. CPG brands are implementing digital-based shopper marketing. All of these line items are layered with data for targeting and personalization. These meetings are literally a dream come true for …

On one side of the bookshelf, you have an ever growing pile of historic business best sellers with promising titles like "In Search of Excellence," "Good to Great" and "Built to Last." Essentially, they're all recipes for building a highly effective company - strategic blueprints for success. On the other side of the bookshelf, you have books like Phil Rosenzweig's "The Halo Effect," dedicated to poking holes in much of the "exhaustive" research we've come to rely on as the canonical collection of sound business practices.

We had good fun last week with my post about live TV slowly but surely losing its once-almost-unattainable perch. Lots of discussion ensued. The TV vs. digital wars seem to have become similar to the Coke vs. Pepsi or Apple vs. Windows battles. It's easy to forget that there are other media besides these two. So this week, let's talk about radio vs. digital. Trust me, it's like TV and digital: an epic battle between existing players and newcomers, with an old guard reinventing itself, with new players coming up and disappearing again, and other assorted dramas.