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?

If a modern day Dante were to write a "Marketing Inferno," a special circle should be reserved for Facebook. It should go to 11 for launching an advocacy campaign targeting Apple by exploiting the very thing it claims it wants to protect: small businesses.

Coming out of what may well be the greatest year of self-reflection for all of society, the ad industry had a huge opportunity to define its sense of purpose and it just blew it.

On the heels of last week's column predicting we are poised to see a dramatic resurgence in contextual targeting, I received a flurry of new announcements leaning back into contextual, including a new offering from Comscore and MediaMath, UM's Primis, Integral Ad Science, and others.