2020 was a banner year for consumer spending despite -- or perhaps because of -- the pandemic, as homebound consumers boosted spending on media content and technology to stay in touch and stay informed and entertained.

Facebook likes to tout how much it has done in recent years to deter bullying of, and by, its users, which is ironic when you consider the social network has emerged as the media industry's biggest bully, online and off. First it uses its muscle to attack Apple's efforts to protect its users' online privacy by mobilizing a paid media and aggressive lobbying campaign asserting Apple is harming small businesses by taking away an efficient and effective ad targeting tool.

Maryland's new tax scheme, which is only attributable to ad sales derived from the state, raises questions about the physical proximity of online media that certain geographies have ignored or sought to sidestep for decades.

While most of the focus has been on the burgeoning platform war between Facebook and Apple, most advertisers still have no concrete plans for adjusting to life after IDFA, Apple's long-standing identifier for advertisers to target iOS users. Here's why I think this will be a good thing.

It's important, not just because it might mitigate risk, but because it will instigate conversations about what's appropriate.

With new coronavirus variants proving more contagious, some are questioning whether it makes sense to continue planning for the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games.

As far as industrial roadways go, Madison Avenue has lost its luster on Wall Street. That is more or less what the subject line of an email dispatch from "Campaign" magazine suggested this morning, teasing: "Are Holding Companies Undervalued?"

As someone who has dived pretty deep into the weeds of consumer data sovereignty models over the past few years, this one seems squeaky clean to me.

During a year in which norms were challenged on almost every front, the most-read "RTBlog" columns focused mostly on normal programmatic and real-time media-buying issues, not the bigger existential threats surrounding them.

As 2020 comes to an end, will next year return to a more balanced sense of reality? You know, one based on facts, not divisive demagoguery?