Agency leaders are standing at the proverbial crossing. Only this is not the standard T-crossing where the road leads either left or right, nor is it a fork in the road where one path leads to unknowns up the mountain, and the other unknowns will be on the path down the valley. This is the Ginza crossing of crossings. Spaghetti Junction. Roads are going every which way, and there is no telling which one is the right one.

Consumers spend an overwhelming amount of time in environments where brands are not always welcome. As good as the ad experiences are on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as a brand you are in constant competition with other people the user would rather talk to: friends, family, the random guy who just posted the funny cat video. How does a brand participate credibly in such environments? This is a subject of endless debate, and one that follows many paths, winding through the realms of content, media, and creative, before inevitably arriving at the doorstep of "authenticity." At first, this feels like …

Earlier this month, OMD's Julie Fleischer and Neustar's Steven Wolfe Pereira poked at data integrity issues during a Chicago conference, creating some timely swirl by highlighting a simple truth: We lack data integrity standards. Advertisers are becoming skeptical of claims about data. We owe them some accountability, but they owe themselves some diligence as well.

By this point in the process you pretty much know whom you're going to be voting for come Nov. 8. In many cases you truly don't like either of the two main candidates (debate performance certainly isn't wooing you) and the secondary ones aren't doing much of anything to garner your attention (other than forgetting the names of world leaders). This column is simply about how political marketing in 2016 is a different beast than any other form of marketing I have ever witnessed - and I hope may never see again.

Millennials are probably the first generation since the Baby Boomers that bridges that adoption of a massively influential technological change. Most definitions of this generation have their birth years starting in the early 1980s and extending to 1996 or '97. This means the early Millennials grew up in an environment that was not all that different from the generation that preceded it. The technologies that were undergoing massive adoption in the early '80s were VCRs and microwaves -- hardly earth-shaking in terms of environmental change. But late Millennials, like my daughters, grew up during the rapid adoption of three massively …

My son, who is 15, has this little joke. I use him frequently as my n=1 sample audience to try and learn about new platforms, games, language, etc. Whenever I ask him something along those lines, he always sighs and then says with a slightly mocking tone, "You're so old!" This is true. Compared to 15, I am ancient. When I was only two years older than he is today, I found myself at the helm of a highly popular but also highly illegal FM pirate radio station in The Netherlands. The local paper came to interview us, and the …

Twice a year I teach a class on entrepreneurism, which has always struck me as something of an oxymoron. How do you learn to be an entrepreneur in a classroom? Entrepreneurs, by definition, do: they work long hours to build something from nothing, they neglect families and friends, they drain bank accounts (their own and others'), and they grind it out.

What's behind the downturn in ratings for NFL games so far this season?

According to many sources from Forrester and beyond, this is the year when digital media ad spend surpasses TV. That's nice and all, but the true anticipation for the future is when TV itself transforms to being part of the digital landscape and the dollars invested in "digital" effectively double almost overnight. Most of the foundational elements of advertising today are setting the stage for a digital, addressable, television landscape. At the core are data and cross-device methodologies.

What do relationship infidelity and consumer behavior have in common? Both are changing, thanks to technology -- or, more specifically, the intersection between technology and our brains. And for you regular readers, you know that stuff is right in my wheelhouse.