I've covered political media and marketing for nearly 40 years, but I feel like I've written more about the consequences for brands in the past year-and-a-half than I have during the preceding decades. In the current politically-charged culture, there is more risk-and-reward for brands than ever before, and nothing underscores it better than the recent pro/con debate surrounding Nike's Colin Kaepernick-inspired "Just Do It" campaign. While it worked for Nike, what's the guidepost for other consumer brands? Now, thanks to 4C Insights, there's a simple decision tree.

On the heels of Taylor Swift coming out in favor of Democratic candidates -- and boosting voter registration among her fans -- a new survey found a marked disparity along party lines. Democratic voters deem celebrity endorsement effective in this year's midterms at about twice the rate of Republican voters.

A new small, but influential segment of the American population has been detected. They consider no news sources to be "trustworthy" - it's also the one that voted disproportionately to elect the current President of the United States.

It may not be possible to calculate how many times the current President has referred to America or one of its Presidents as the "laughing stock" of the world, but he made it come true Tuesday to a global audience on TV, the internet and countless social media feeds carrying his address to the United Nations General Assembly.

Partisan politics is far from new in news reporting, but the proliferation of niche digital news publications aimed at readers -- and/or viewers -- across the political spectrum appears to be accelerating. And while most of the attention has been on conservative and/or alt right publications, liberal and progressive publishers are also gaining steam.

For most Americans, their personal data privacy now rivals our Constitution's most basic rights, according to results of a recent survey conducted by James Madison's Montpelier. The study, which was fielded by Edelman Intelligence, was designed to understand how important and secure Americans believe their Constitutional Rights are, and whether and how they should be amended. Ninety-five percent of Americans said their data privacy is somewhat or extremely important to them, about the same percentage that cited their civil rights (96%) and their voting rights (95%) and more than cited freedom of the press (91%), freedom of religion (90%) and ...

Today, I'm doing the same for Donald J. Trump that I've been doing for other sociopaths. I'm going to stop referring to him by his name. From this point forward, he'll be objectified as the common noun "President."

By going after Google's search algorithm this week, Trump fails to understand how search queries work, and the fact that it is a reflection of his own personal search history. He might as well declare a war on mirrors, because what he sees reflecting back at him is, in his own words, "BAD" and "fake."

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but when the picture is a four-color one on "The New York Times" front page showing the President's personal attorney leaving a courthouse after pleading guilty and testifying that he was directed by the President to pay hush money to two women during the 2016 campaign to keep them from speaking publicly about affairs they said they had with him, it's got to be worth something more than that.

"The President of the United States called a woman a DOG," author Stephen King tweeted this morning, continuing with what may be one of the most horrifying things he's ever written, "Let me repeat that: he called her a DOG. Have we gotten so numb to Trump's ugly, demeaning talk that this means nothing? You might like her, you might not, but to call her a DOG?"