I was in the U.S. last week. It was my first visit in the Trump era. It was weird. I was in California, so the full effect was muted, but I watched my tongue when meeting strangers. And that's speaking as a Canadian, where watching your tongue is a national pastime.

Tthere was kind of a big bang last week from Ogilvy & Mather, which announced it was reintegrating the manifold O&M USA subsidiaries into one company - with, surprisingly, one P&L. That last bit is really important, because it will potentially set the company apart apart from other agency groups that have not quite gone there. Others are selling themselves as "integrated," yet they try to do so while still managing separate P&Ls for each brand name under the umbrella.

There are strong indications that the next technological revolution will be artificial intelligence. For decades, AI has been a sci-fi dream, but core developments in several complementary areas are now colliding to make AI a reality.

The organization has a short-term "sales culture." Almost everything marketing does is oriented toward creating a lead. You know there are larger system/infrastructure issues impacting performance, but you can't expect anyone to invest/focus on them. You're on a "trend mill," running as fast as you can but going nowhere.It's a nightmare that thousands of marketers are living every day, so let's fix this issue -- permanently.

Many people talk about the future of advertising. It's a hot topic, especially when you come from an agency background. I've sat in debates and had exchanges with people on the agency side about this over the last few years and my conclusion is a simple one: The future of advertising is marketing, and agencies' structure is changing to reflect that.

We might be in a period of ethical crisis. Or not. It's tough to say. It really depends on what you believe. And that, in a nutshell, is the whole problem.

We are living in very uncertain times. Uncertainty is a challenging problem, because the human mind is conditioned for survival. Facing uncertainty, your instinct will automatically drive you to choose the safest option. And when alternate options cannot be easily predicted in terms of results, you might be tempted to elect the status quo, even when the status quo is demonstrably not desirable.

In the final days of 2016, the website of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources got a bit of a refresh. Unless you were paying close attention, you might have missed it. After all, most people don't regularly visit the Wisconsin DNR. But the changes were caught by a website-monitoring service and shared on some blogs, starting with a guy named James Rowen. Turns out the changes are kind of important -- IF you think climate change is kind of important.

Yes, streaming services are starting to eat away at multichannel TV. So what if 50% of today's linear TV viewing shifted over to streaming services over the next three or four years? A lot would happen. Hundreds of billions of dollars of retail brand sales could be put in jeopardy, while brands' relationships with retailers would change dramatically. Here's why:

Remember "The Year of Mobile"? Every year from 2006 all the way to 2016 was proclaimed the year of mobile, but in retrospect I think 2015 might have actually been accurately named. That feels like the year when mobile matured the most. Well, I'm here to make another bold proclamation: The years 2017 through 2027 shall be named the "Year of TV" -- every year, repeatedly.