Question from a seller of digital advertising: I always ask my current agency partners how my site is performing because I'm worried I'm going to get canceled from the plan. But they never seem to be able to share anything I can act on. How can I ever know if I'm in danger of being canceled?

Trust is all that binds us. Here's a story of a little girl who knows that -- a bridge to what I want to say about how, as an industry of online publishing, we are hemorrhaging trust. Users are figuring out more and more everyday that publishers cannot be trusted to protect users' rights to privacy.

How did the stupidest people in our industry all find their way into the same job? Email marketing has become a game of cheap, underhanded tactics at best, and criminal at worst: a dangerous concoction of blatantly lying to customers, creating purposefully confusing checkout processes with permission for email marketing auto-checked, and then gracefully ignoring the customer preference and marketing to them anyway. T

More than a few of you cheered when I pointed out last February that automated media bidding and buying would not eliminate the need for salespeople any more than the advent of computer traded financial products eliminated the need for stock brokers. But did you think about the implications for sales management and sales skills in a world where the advertiser doesn't have to call you to get a price quote? Are the skills salespeople need or sales management should hire for, or develop in their sales team, different than they used to be?