The Albarda household quite likes "Jane the Virgin." I am not sure if we are in the demo for this show, but actress Gina Rodriguez and her TV family, friends and enemies make for wonderful entertainment. We also really appreciate the inclusion of voiceover actor Anthony Mendez and his quick recaps at the beginning of the show. If you are familiar with his voice and style, please imagine it for a minute voicing the rest of today's article. Hello, friends. Where were we? Let's see:

Regular readers of my column will be aware that I've become a little obsessed with exponentially accelerating technology of late. I blame Singularity University, where I spent a week in March. There I heard that Intel's Gordon Moore was more correct than even he realized when he came up with his now-famous law about the performance pace of computing doubling every 18 months. Moore's Law doesn't just apply to computers. It applies to any information-enabled technology, like robotics, nanotech, artificial intelligence, and more -- all moving inexorably along an exponentially accelerating curve. Hang out with the SU folks long enough, …

The term "campaign" is outliving its purpose in the advertising and marketing world. The concept is too linear and implies the brand is on control of the conversation, which is no longer the case. Lots of brands are coming up with other vernacular to describe the process, and you should as well.

Intellectually, I hate clickbait. But do I click on it? You bet - usually before I stop to think. It hits me in the quick and dirty (in every sense of the word) part of my brain. Much as I know I should be better than this, I find myself clicking through more viscerally tantalizing slideshows than I would care to admit. Humans, of which I number myself one, are suckers for sensationalism. So I admit to human foibles. But in doing so, I stress that they're something we should strive to overcome. Rationality should rule the day. We should …

Every now and again even I, with all my rational wisdom (I am, after all Dutch) have to throw my hands in the air and say to a particular marketer (in the words of Jay Leno to Hugh Grant after he'd been arrested for indecent conduct), "What the hell where you thinking?"

"Write a blog," they tell you. "Create interesting content people want to read. Don't use it to sell. Provide value first, that you may be rewarded." "It's the wave of the future," they go on to say. "It's Web 2.0." And so you write a blog. Once a week, you dutifully report on some aspect of your business, or your industry, or the world. You get it: it's not about pushing product; it's about building relationships. And yet, somehow, it doesn't seem to work. Why does content marketing so often fail? Two reasons.

We're in the lazy days of August, when most in the media and advertising business are vacationing, or at least taking Fridays off, and everything slows down. It's hard not to let your mind drift to the future and wonder what might be in store for us this fall. Here are some five near-certainties that we should expect to greet us in the months ahead:

Data-driven marketing is a complicated business, but there's still a simple way to break down the market and develop a strategy, one that's easily taught to all members of your marketing org.

As I was reading Walter Isaacson's new book, "The Innovators," which chronicles the rise of the digital revolution, something struck me. From Charles Babbage to Sergey Brin, the arc of digital innovation has gone through three very distinct stages. In the last, starting in the '60s, a new breed of innovator emerged: the innovative entrepreneur. Almost without exception, they started within a larger organizational context, but soon found a way to break free and build a company around their innovativeness. This all becomes more than academically interesting in light of Google's announced corporate re-org, Alphabet.

Not a week goes by when we don't find confirmation of the fragility of our digital and mobile existence. By now your identity has probably come into the hands of shady Internet operators (and/or the Chinese government) at least once or perhaps multiple times. The U.S. government, banks, airlines, insurance companies, retailers, credit card companies - who hasn't reported a data breach yet?