Nick Johnson, senior vice president- digital sales for NBCUniversal, is taking on a new role overseeing sales efforts for the NBC Sports Group digital portfolio. He will continue to report directly to Peter Naylor, executive vice president-digital media sales, and will also report on a dotted line basis to Seth Winter, senior vice president of Sports & Olympics Sales, NBCUniversal.

Chad Maxwell has joined Starcom USA as senior vice president-research intelligence director. He had been with sister Publicis agency Razorfish, where he led the Consumer Insights Research Group.

A new holiday spending forecast from Deloitte predicts a 2.5 to 3% gain this holiday season, with November through January retail sales expected to reach between $873 and $877 billion. Last year, sales grew 5.9%. "And while 3% is nothing to celebrate, if you just looked straight out at the facts, you might come up with a lower forecast," Alison Paul, vice chairman of Deloitte LLP and U.S. retail and distribution sector leader, tells Marketing Daily. "But if past is prelude, the consumer continues to surprise up by being fairly resilient, and retailers keep finding new ways to draw …

Joe: new notion of tech neutrality: how much do you get behind tech that gives you easy answers that you are comfortable using. Is there an imbalance? are we putting too much weight on tech and platforms like social media. in terms of consumers what's out of whack? Laura Krajecki: tech is giving us fresh creative fuel to create against, but just because GPS says go over cliff, don't just follow it. it's a guide. what we do is design experiences and they require rich understanding, dynamically, of consumer insights. Kim Kadlec: we have flooded the market with apps. …

Joe: you are the best human beings to talk about how others think about brands. how fast is tech changing in terms of intelligence. AI is accelerating, and do you think at some point, we already for ten or fifteen years have automated how network tv buy happens. now there are optimizers that started 15 years ago. now so much media planning is automated. can we get to point that tech can target people better than people can. Scott Neslund: it's still 50/50 business. We are at point where tech can target, but when you look at partnerships, you …

Kim Kadlec points out that her 22 year old consumers digital media totally differently than her 17 year old. "It's like night and day The. older one uses laptop. little one it's part of her body, it's a different interaction. As we age, marketers -- and we are digital immigrants not natives -- we are going to have to study hard to understand new generation." Joe Mandese: how have people really changed fundamentally, though? one thing I sense from Kim's presentation is that word of mouth matters but in the past consumers didn't have the power and influence they …

Joe Mandese - it's reach and relationship. not reach and frequency. has madison ave finally grown up to respect the consumer and is media planning going toward user experience? Kim Kadlec of J&J: not just an agency issue. I worked on agency side for years. but now on client side we all need to own this. agencies are incentivized and paid by clients to do certain things. clients pay for behavior we want. if we are moving from commodity based to relationship media, well that's a different service, but we need to make shift more toward that. Joe: how …

Kim Kadlec, WW VP of global marketing at J&J did something unusual: she talked about a lot of non-J&J brands as case studies to illustrate her eight golden rules of "netiquette." Lots of interesting programs. Laura Krajecki, chief consumer officer at starcom mediavest. marketers thinking you can grow business by just getting people to buy stuff is old. now it's depending relationships. moving from media channel reality to one of experience. it's fundamentally about building relationship. that was the original idea of marketing going back to city square. human relationship Sarah Power of Initiative: it's about taking a …

One of the themes emerging at OMMA Global is growing support for HTML5 as a standard for mobile development, signaling a potential end to the dominance of native apps on devices. Denise Warren, SVP & chief advertising officer, The New York Times Media Group, said the company is placing a big bet on HTML5, using the programming language to build its core mobile products. Both the NY Times and Time provide HTML5 support for video in their iPad apps, via Brightcove. In a separate talk, Evan Neufeld of mobile research firm Ground Truth looked ahead to the blurring of lines between the …

Leading off the afternoon keynotes at OMMA Global, is Dermot McCormack, EVP, Digital Media, MTV Networks. McCormack laid out his 3 pillars for the evolving future of creating content for new platforms: building authority, curate and provide context to what you do. Given the array of media options online—31 million video streams, 200 million tweets per day—it's critical for publishers to establish themselves as an authority in a given area. MTV has long been a hub for music, but how does it remain relevant on the Web? McCormack said the network has updated or reinvented assets including the VMAs …