The world is becoming a pretty technical place. The Internet of Things is surrounding us. Which sounds exciting -- until the Internet of Things doesn't work. Then what?

How often do you see marketers calling for a pitch simply because there is (a) a new head of marketing, or (b) for whatever reason, the current agency has been determined to "suck"? While (a) and/or (b) might be valid reasons to go and hunt for a new agency solution, I would argue that there are a number of other things that need to happen first or at least at the same time before issuing RFPs to (potential) agencies.

The American romance with the automobile is the stuff of legend. Seldom has a product of mechanical engineering been as obsessed over by pop culture as the car. Just peek inside that 100-year almanac of American desires, hopes and fears known as The Movies and you'll see the wide range of protagonists it plays: friend ("The Love Bug,") enemy ("Christine"), accomplice ("Bonnie and Clyde," "Drive)", freedom fighter ("Mad Max"), outlaw, ("Smokey and the Bandit"), sarcophagus ("The Godfather), time machine ("Back to The Future") and sexual aid (every James Bond film).

MediaPost reported yesterday on the 2017 edition of the American Marketing Association's Marketers Confidence Index. Apparently, marketers today are losing confidence in their ability to meet key goals, like reaching the right customers with their marketing efforts, or being able to understand or evaluate the ROI of their marketing plans. That's in spite of the fact that they feel more confident overall.

I think marketing is going to be getting much, much easier over the next couple of years. The primary challenge to marketers over the last 15 years or so has been fragmentation, and we are now rapidly heading toward a landscape that is the opposite of fragmented. With consolidation, marketers need only pick a few partners and go deep with them in order to creatively reach their target audience. Follow me down this logical path.

I still see -- in a number of MediaPost articles and in other places -- a lot of talk about "brand love." So let's talk about that.

It's a tough time to have a senior job on the agency holding company side. P&G exec Marc Pritchard's call to arms to right the ship that is (digital) advertising was immediately followed by a P&G media review in Northwest Europe. And a number of further bombs have hit the bastion of agency holding companies' business.

This article is not about Trump, but we're going to have to go through him to get to the point.

15 years ago, the Pew Research Center opined that there was no evidence of "information bubbles." We had asked because we suspected that the human proclivity to select self-validating conversations would find fertile ground in (then-nascent) social media.15 years on, the information bubble concept has found popular appeal as "echo chambers." The idea is that as people define the filters on their communications using online channels, they inevitably filter out points of view they might disagree with. This includes who we "friend" or follow. The result, for each individual, is the illusion that society generally agrees with his or her …

Can the impact of fake news and the resulting backlash actually strengthen mainstream news outlets and dismantle Facebook and Twitter over time?