Being an ad guy at heart, and one who specifically grew out of media, I love seeing the role of media professionals become front and center in the digital economy. But it's interesting because media is getting both easier and harder at the very same time.

The Olympics is probably the biggest show on earth. With the possible exception of the World Cup, it's the time when the highest number of people on the planet are all watching the same thing at the same time. This makes it advertising nirvana. Or it should.

Last week Facebook retaliated against ad blockers by launching an ad-block blocker. This happened on Aug. 9, and by Aug. 11, the good folks at Adblock Plus had provided an update that continued to block Facebook ad content. Facebook, not to be outdone, launched an update to the Adblock Plus update, nullifying the quick work of the ad blocker's engineers. By Aug. 12, at 4:30 a.m. Pacific Time, those engineers launched their latest update. And in return, the Facebook engineers quickly "hackathonned" their way to yet another patch, which they released on the 12th at around 10 a.m. Pacific (so …

The "opening" up of the television set-top is getting a lot of attention these days. The Federal Communications Commission has called for pay TV providers to "open" up TV set-top box standards so that consumers can buy devices directly from third-party manufacturers, and President Obama added his very public support last week.

The big new thing often starts out being dismissed as a toy. Facebook, Snapchat, virtual reality, bots, emoji, messaging -- what marketer took them seriously at the beginning? What marketer dares to ignore them now? Somewhere back in time, any marketer could have seized the moment, but many rode past it on a wagon train of legacy models and old thinking. As a result, media channels today are clogged with advertising's walking dead -- static banners, 30-second spots that bury the lede, you know the ones -- that consumers either ignore or kill. The new marketing stack is predicated on …

We need some new memes, some new topics of interest for the industry to grab hold of and beat into the ground on panel after panel, at industry conferences and in columns like this one.

Two weeks ago, Gary Milner wrote a lucid prediction of what advertising might become. He rightly stated that advertising has been in a 40-year period of disruption. Bingo. He went on to say that he sees a consolidation of media buying into a centralized hub. Again, I don't question the clarity of Milner's crystal ball. It makes sense to me. What is missing from Milner's column, however, is the truly disruptive iceberg that is threatening to founder advertising as we know it: the total disruption of the relationship between the advertiser and the marketplace.

I have looked up a number of athletes who are currently in Rio. And it is amazing how good most of them are at "marketing" and "branding," even though their number-one job is tennis, boxing, soccer, beach volleyball or another sport. They also know how to integrate the brands of their sponsors on occasion. Sure, you say, but they get all kinds of support for that, which may be true for some of the biggest names. But what you'll see is that athletes share their own updates with their fans in an authentic voice in every post. Brand integrations feel …

"Self-driving cars are coming but most people don't want one," wrote MediaPost writer Chuck Martin back in March, citing a study of people 15 to 90 years old. Two weeks later, he followed it up with this final stat: 63% of kids aged 8 to 18 "would prefer to do the driving rather than letting the vehicle handle the task." Really? People are resistant to new technology? What a surprise. Surely if a poll says people don't want a new thing, it won't happen, right?

The ultimate fate of Yahoo, or its pieces, will be the subject of a lot of speculation. But in the meantime, it seems appropriate to mark the occasion of the company's pending absorption into Verizon. We may look back on this as a historic turning point for our industry.