"Your Aunt Trudi is coming over today," said my mom. "And she always brings you chocolates. But I don't want you to eat them. Give them to me instead. If you eat them, I won't let you compete in the gymnastics tournament." "No problem!" I replied cheerfully. I was seven. Aunt Trudi arrived, and handed me the chocolate box. I promptly took it to my room, ate half of it, and hid the rest in my drawer I was stunned when my mother discovered my deception almost immediately. I was even more stunned when she didn't let me compete in …

I was part of a panel on the "Evolving Advertising Landscape" at UBS' 42nd Annual Global Media & Telecommunications conference in New York City. The moderator, UBS' Eric Sheridan, sent us some questions in advance of the session to prep. I thought that sharing some of those questions -- and my answers -- would be a great way to give you a sense of the issues we talked about. Here they are:

2016 is shaping up to be an interesting year. If there's one thing we can all absolutely agree on for next year, it's that there will be very little to agree on. 2016 will be all about debate and the possibilities the future offers, so it could be an amazing year for our business.

The first time you see the University of Texas-Austin's AIM traffic management simulator in action, you can't believe it would work. It shows the intersection of two 12-lane, heavily trafficked roads. There are no traffic lights, no stop signs, none of the traffic control systems we're familiar with. Yet traffic zips through with an efficiency that's astounding.

When I was studying marketing, I was fascinated to learn about cognitive dissonance. Typically, this means finding "convenient truths" or beliefs that mitigate the inconsistency. Humans display this behavior all the time. We know smoking kills you -- yet many people smoke. We know that pollution is slowly destroying the world we live in, but we consume more and more of everything each year. Cognitively we know these things, but the discomfort that these facts create because we do not like or cannot imagine a life without the very things that are causing the problem allow us to conveniently forget …

"Premium inventory" is one of those squishy industry terms that mutates each time you scrutinize it. Most people can at least agree on this much: A premium "thing" is usually higher quality and higher cost than other available "things" in that category - e.g. a Rolex is premium compared to a Swatch, and a BMW 7 Series is premium compared to the 1975 Pontiac Catalina I drove in grad school.

This is the formula for a collision. Ask any navigator. It's how you can tell if that blip on radar might be deadly - and a very good reason to change course. Today, in the advertising industry, there are two such ominous blips on radar, but neither seems willing to change course: agencies and advertisers. They both have reasons to break off course, but are held there by seemingly inexorable forces.

Do you know the difference between probabilistic and deterministic audience data - and how people are using these different types of data to build more effective marketing and advertising programs? These two words have been thrown around quite a bit lately - and since most people in advertising hate to use words with this many syllables, they must be important. So here goes:

A bigger part of my world is becoming ad-free. My TV viewing is probably 80% ad-free now. Same with my music listening. Together, that costs me about $20 per month. It's a price I don't mind paying.But what if we push that to its logical extreme? What if we made the entire world ad-free?