There is an odd discontinuity in the online advertising business: brand versus direct response (DR). An opposing force, the pressure to integrate the purchase funnel, top to bottom, is increasing. Given that "brand" lives mainly at the top of the funnel, and DR at the bottom, you would think a tight connection would be essential. Yet, in way too many cases, the connection between demand-generation and closing the sale seems academic, or at best, slow-mo.

My marketing resolution for 2017 is a simple one: Never let ego get in the way of a good idea. You may shrug your shoulders and nod your head, but this is easier said than done.

Each year my friend Scott Brinker sits down to update his marketing-technology landscape, and each year he is amazed by the explosion of vendors he has to fit on a single slide. Last year's version clocked in at 3,874 martech solutions -- almost twice as many as 2015. He started in 2011 with about 150, and it has effectively doubled with each iteration. While everyone has expected eventual consolidation of martech, this hasn't happened to date. Why?

Thanks to the data that digital creates, very disparate media offerings -- from radio networks to OOH companies -- are actually capable of many of the same things. And as an industry, we have not adapted very well to this changing offering. What has the digital evolution of these media forms, and the data they generate, created?

Dave Morgan's predictions: from the rise of enterprise tech and STEM marketers to the fall of the term "programmatic."

The ad started showing up in my Facebook feed in the past weeks: "Subscribe to the New York Times," it said. "Fact-based reporting." In our current post-truth era, fact-based is now a unique value proposition.

The biggest topic of the coming year is artificial intelligence. Everyone from Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk to Tom Cruise and Kanye West is talking about A.I. All the large enterprise software companies are launching products to automate various processes with machine learning. This step in A.I. development as it relates to our industry, is about optimization and matching people to offers, or people to messages that are likely to resonate. It's not about replacing a role as much as it is about improving it -- a necessary and welcome evolution in the digital media landscape.

Sorry, Mark Zuckerberg, but no matter what you may have said in the past about not being a media outlet, you can't duck this responsibility. If our public opinions are formed on your private property that is an unimaginably powerful platform, then, as Spidey's Uncle Ben said (or the French National Convention of 1793, depending on whom you're prefer to quote as a source): "With great power comes great responsibility."

All sorts of news was vying for attention this past week. Accenture evolved its marketing services offering further, buying top UK creative agency Karmarama. And as a further proof point that the relationship between media agencies and media owners is really warped, The Daily Mail in the UK disclosed that for the second year in a row it set money aside to pay agency holding companies a volume bonus independent from clients' volume deals (almost $27 million in 2016). And P&G shared at its analyst day last week how it has cut its agency roster from a generous 6,000 to …

Forget about Millennials. Anyone trying to understand the future of media and technology should observe what the children do. First of all, they talk to computers.