On Feb. 1, WhatsApp announced a major milestone: 1 billion active monthly users, sending a total of 42 billion messages per day. Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, also has 800 million active monthly users for its Messenger. If you add WeChat and Viber to that list, the top four messaging apps combined have three billion users. Even assuming some duplication across user bases, this is an astoundingly large number. It's as if, while the media ecosystem wasn't looking, an entirely new planet appeared on the horizon.

As you read this sentence, new, spectacular statistics are being written about mobile's inevitable march through marketing. Yet in a mad dash for profit, we are blowing a huge opportunity. Mobile, in its own right, is a bunch of marketing channels. But mobile data, in sum, brings the already formidable raft of data (from shopping, Web behaviors, etc.) to an inflection point. That is, Big Data now has a shot at helping people avoid security and health threats as they happen. What issues will we face? What happens when Marlboro Man meets Big Brother?

Guess what! B2B marketing doesn't have to suck. In fact, it's getting "sexy." I don't mean B2B marketing is starting to push the boundaries of what can be considered risqu. But it is starting to employ the elements that make B2C marketing work - which makes B2B attractive to progressive marketers. Core to this transformation are insights derived from data and applied in a creative fashion.

Last week, I talked about the trend of "hyper" expectations and corporate valuations. Peter Fader, a marketing professor at the Wharton School, commented, "This is why we need to replace the guesswork of tech valuation with the more rigorous, valid, and operational notion of 'customer-based corporate valuation.'" I had a chance to look at Professor Fader's paper on the topic. Essentially, he proposes a new model for the valuation of subscription-based businesses based on a calculation of customer lifetime value that uses publicly available information. While interesting in its own right, the model shows a fundamental shift of thinking that …

It's time we see those Super Bowl spots across multiple screens for what they really are: a fata manana. That's a combination of "fata morgana" and "manana." The dictionary explains the "fata morgana" or "mirage" as "something that is seen and appears to be real but that is not actually there." "Manana" obviously is Spanish for tomorrow. Thus, the "fata manana" is an indication of an illusion that we think will happen tomorrow (the day after the Super Bowl).

The iTunes store opened on April 28, 2003. In just five years it became the largest music vendor in the United States, proving Steve Jobs right when he said that it's not that people want to steal, it's just so darn hard to be law-abiding and so freaking easy to grab a free MP3 off a file-sharing service. The message was clear: If you make it easy for us to pay, we'll pay. A simple message. And yet, here we are, eight years later, and the movie industry never got the memo.

Viewability is fast becoming the standard for online advertising, but the implications for its full acceptance still need to be discussed. While a lot of good comes from this change, we should be aware of the challenges that come as well -- at least so we know how to respond.

Amazon is a disappointment. In the fourth quarter of 2015, it made a measly $482 million profit on sales of $35.7 billion. That's a 22% gain in revenue from a year ago, and over a 100% gain in profit. In that year, Amazon also doubled its market value to over $300 billion. Bunch of deadbeats. Last week, Amazon's share price took a beating in after hours trading, dropping 15%. Serves you right, slackers. And this all happened because despite Amazon's healthy performance, it "didn't meet analyst's expectations." Maybe it's time to look at those expectations.

We have written here before about the alleged improprieties that agency holding companies, and especially their media and digital outposts, may have conducted with their clients' money. For decades, rumors swirled around, and some actual cases came to light in Europe. And then last March Jon Mandel, former CEO of Mediacom, spoke at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) Media Leadership Conference. He lobbed bombshells, mentioning "a media agency agreeing with an unnamed media vendor to an industry-standard 2% commission, but as much as 9% in volume-based incentive."