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 …

Recently a media buyer asked me, in the course of a presentation, whether certain insights were modeled. It's a good question, sort of. When I qualified the answer, telling him that the network in question had 30% return paths, and a census of declared data based on actual customer addresses, he repeated the question: Sooo it's a model, (becoming terse) right!? Yes, but ... this model, in the grand scheme of things, was very predictive. In retrospect though, my answer was not too great either. We both fell into the widening gulch (like Thelma and Louise?) between assumption and reality …

I remember when the digital media business was just a twinkle in the eyes of many people. The industry was small, but the digital ad part was even smaller, made up of about 300 people who were engaging with one another to help generate new thoughts and ideas. Conversations launched new concepts that eventually grew into companies and categories and created whole new ways of delivering messages to the consumer.

"Would you rather lose a limb or never be able to access the Internet?" My daughter looked at me, waiting for my answer. "Well?"

Merry Christmas. Or Chanukah. Or Kwanzaa. Whatever you celebrate, I hope you got a year-end bonus -- because the robots are coming for your job. They're coming whether you're a taxi driver or a truck driver. They're coming whether you're a doctor or a lawyer. If your job involves repetition, or information processing, or data analysis, you're at risk.

How to identify and target brand advocates -- who will spend hours reading your content, watching your videos, and attending your events -- but never buy your products themselves. They're also the ones who will recommend your brand to a colleague who is searching for a vendor to fit a need.

Tesla, Apple, Microsoft: All of these brands have taken their lumps in the press over the years, but each one continues to succeed. They all understand a simple truth: For your brand to succeed, either in B2C or B2B, you must understand your consumers' two primary motivations as emotional and logical.

If you were standing at a moderately busy bus stop, chances are somebody else waiting with you would be smarter than the president-elect of the United States. That's why I think IBM's Watson should run for president in 2020.

Every year since I started writing here back in 2013, I have looked back and tallied how well I did in terms of generating "Shares," "Recommendations" and "Comments" for the posts I wrote, as indicators of "controversy." Did I stir your pot? The good news is: I did!

Two things we heard a lot about in 2016 were "autonomous cars" and "bots," but rarely in the same sentence. True, they both share the common thread of AI, which powers the "self" in self-driving cars (computer vision, decisioning) and the chatty personalization of bots. But that's where the similarity ends, because most bots don't employ real AI or machine learning, but are just collections of "if-then" statements in a new package. Indeed, two of the things we might most associate with 2016 are "bot hype" and "bot fatigue," which is due, no doubt, to the utter triviality of most …