It's now pretty clear that a lot of digital video ad deliveries over the past few years were of suspect quality. That's not news to anyone in this industry. Most analysts are estimating that at least one-third of digital video ads bought over the past two years were un-viewable, fraudulent or the product of robotic traffic. Many folks are asking how this could have happened. To me, who lives and works in New York City and who has been part of the digital ad industry since it was born in the early '90s, it all seems pretty straightforward. What happened …

In an excellent essay earlier this year, philosopher Thomas Wells argued that "Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted."

How do you get the most out of a conference? That's a simple question, but one that too many people tend to overlook because we're all busy and simply just show up. I spent the last few days at two different conferences, and I was continually amazed at attendees' lack of preparation. You need to work to make conferences fruitful from a personal perspective.

I learned a lesson this past week watching my stepdad talking to folks at the gym: We need chatting. We need to bump into people, face-to-face, and make the mutual agreement to free up a few minutes from our rigid agendas to take part in shooting the breeze.

A lot has been written about last week's announcement that the Association of National Advertisers has instructed Ebiquity and K2 Intelligence to investigate if agencies are really as devious as some say they are. It is alleged that agencies negotiate deals that give them free media space for which they charge clients (ka-ching!). It is alleged they knowingly place difficult-to-trace invisible programmatic inventory for clients (ka-ching!). Or they get additional volume discounts over the total of the volume placed with the media, which they funnel this to agency holding accounts, possibly not even in the country where the discount is …

So we have established that the ad-blocking thing is a bit of a crisis. And we've looked at the measures the IAB is taking to make advertising more awesome for people -- too little, too late. What, then, might the solution be?

We may enjoy the ease of search, and find some websites rather slick, but the truth is that most e-commerce sites are little more than a content management system with nice product photography: the virtual equivalent of neon lighting and clear signage in a warehouse, a space perfected for function, but devoid of emotion, enjoyment of richness. E-commerce works well despite its design, not because of it. So here are some thoughts on how to rethink what e-commerce could become.

Maybe, just maybe, it's time you stop referring to the mobile industry as "mobile," because you're simply perpetuating a silo of thought that no longer applies.

Statistically speaking, it appears that there's a correlation between atheism and innovation. But my point in last week's column was not to show that atheists are more innovative. My goal was to try to hypothesize what the underlying causation might be.

There is a new book out by Michael Wolff called "Television is the New Television." I have not read it yet, but have seen various reviews of it. It seems Wolf says that all the main digital media want to be television. Facebook, with its enormous reach and now-auto-playing videos, wants to be television. Google, with its equally humongous reach, wants to be television, which is why it has YouTube. Twitter wants to be TV with Vine and Periscope. And the print media, with its video-heavy digital platforms, want to be TV. Even Snapchat thought it wanted to be TV, …