Last week, I said there was an emerging market for morality. I painted that particular picture in a somewhat negative light. Andrew Goodman, a fellow Canadian whom I have always admired both for his intellect and morality, called me on it (via my Facebook feed): "Nice post, but I was hoping for a little more from this." I'll paraphrase Andrew's eloquent and lengthy reply by boiling it down to essentially this: Extreme circumstances call for extreme measures and if that has to come from corporations and their advertising, then so be it.

Loyal readers know that I have frequently written about "the dawn of the robots." A recent flurry of articles on the subject of our automated future has more than strengthened my belief that it will be AI - 1, Humanity - 0 in the foreseeable future.

The Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear VR, and Sony Playstation VR are separate systems with their own specs, and there is no guarantee that applications and content developed for one platform will run on another. Not to mention AR platforms like Magic Leap and Microsoft HoloLens. This creates a major distribution challenge for VR app developers, and content creators, and brands seeking marketing opportunities within these new experiences.

As recent events have shown, we are living in the age of feeling versus an age of reason. It's a time when people often act - or react - first without having any, or all, of the facts. And the media may (or may not) be reading more into things than are actually there. Take for example, Budweiser's "Born the Hard Way" Super Bowl ad.

It's a fact: Creativity thrives in times of chaos and angst. I anticipate some amazingly creative work over the next four years. This year's crop of Super Bowl ads was a beginning.

Things are going to get interesting in the world of marketing. And the first indication of that was seen this past Sunday during the Super Bowl. As Bob Garfield noted, there were a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle undercurrents in the ads that ran in between the distracting sub-story that played out on the field. Things got downright political, with a number of $167K-a-second ad swipes at the current president and his policies.

Last week, the Doomsday Clock was moved from 3 minutes to midnight to 2.5 minutes to 12. Scientists believe that the chance of the world going up in a thermonuclear puff of smoke is the highest it's been since 1953. This in the same week that Marc Pritchard, the global brand building officer from P&G, made waves by announcing that P&G, in effect, had moved the hand of the ad-spend doomsday clock to 12. High noon!

You wake up, yawn, stretch. Pick up the phone. Check Facebook. "Like." "Like." "Like," again. After 10 "likes," Michal Kosinski knows you better than your work colleagues. After 70, he knows you better than your partner does, including -- whether these things were explicitly referenced in your clicks or not -- your skin color, your sexual orientation, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, whether you smoke or do drugs... The list goes on.

2016 was rife with stories pointing out the decay of advertising. The saddest of those suggest we have lost our way. If so, the reason would be that the landscape has changed. Whenever I get lost, I go back to basics and find a landmark. Today, I offer such a landmark: the Advertising Research Foundation Response model.

When marketers determine how to spend their money, they tend to look at each channel and decide on allocation. This typically breaks out to TV, online, mobile, out-of-home, print, events/experiences, etc. What's interesting is, three of those areas - TV, online and mobile - are converging quite rapidly, and two of them may end up looking like the same thing in the coming years.