The advertising marketplace is evolving quickly, with the introduction of new platforms, new metrics and new technologies. Jeff Siegel, SVP Advertising for Rovi, has experienced them all in his career -- from the broadcast model to cable to a company like Rovi, one of the new players in the media space that is changing the framework of viewing preferences, content platforms and ad models. In a video interview conducted a few days before the roll-out of a new Rovi initiative on Smart TV, Jeff talks about the differences between the broadcast, cable and new platform marketplaces, Set Top Box data, …

With the recent announcements by Time Warner Cable and Cablevision that they will launch iPad apps to stream (some of) their cable television offerings to subscribers, three questions immediately came to mind. First, how, if at all, do current carriage agreements address the possibility of iPad distribution? Second, how will iPad viewing be measured and ratings allocated? Third, before this turns into another classic case of industry parties negotiating with each other over how to divide presumed incremental revenue, here's the most important question: What does the consumer think regarding the value created by this new capability?

If you've been as glued to your screens as I have -- thanks, NCAA, for the excellent iPad app -- you know that this year's Division I college basketball tournament has been the most compelling in years. The Final Four offered up a great show this weekend, and some attention-worthy lessons for the teambuilders among us looking to win in what has become a very competitive environment.

We could fill up several columns with definitions that apply to the concept of digital media. This week we focus on digital hardware -- from the server to the box to the remote:</

At last June's D8 Conference, Steve Jobs made some astute remarks about the TV industry's seemingly insurmountable roadblocks to innovation. Critics and fans alike posited that Jobs was posing as a decoy, while Apple geared up for a sneak attack into the TV space.

I've always been fascinated by the principle of inertia. The word sounds passive -- but inertia is actually very elegant. In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton defined it as "a power of resisting, by which every body endeavors to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving forward in a straight line." From Galileo we learned that we really couldn't tell the difference between a body at rest and one in motion without an outside reference to compare it against. So from several really smart guys we learned that one of the principal laws of the universe …

The television advertising measurement system has been broken for a long time. Television remains the biggest ad bucket around, at more than $70 billion, yet there's never been a way for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ads outside of survey work and econometric modeling. TUntil fairly recently, all any marketer had to go on was a hope and a prayer, tied to an age- and sex-driven demographic segment. We've suspected those demos to be obsolete for a while now. But it wasn't until this week that CBS Research head David Poltrack confirmed the industry's worst fears.

But since I can't totally ignore March Madness, due to its ever-present availability -- with every game to be seen on CBS, TNT, TBS and truTV -- I decided that I needed to embrace the platform and see how it could be adapted to other regular broadcasting. Outside of perhaps Butler, truTV has had the most upside from the tournament than anyone. Its shared coverage of games has been the biggest ratings draw in the network's history. That got me thinking: What other networks could benefit from a similar content partnership?

Jo Holz is one of the leading researchers in the industry today. In addition to her work at NBC, Children's Television Workshop, iN DEMAND, and Oxygen, she is currently SVP, Client Research Initiatives at Nielsen. In her 30+ years in media research, Jo has experienced firsthand the great shift in the television landscape, from broadcast to cable to VOD.

As the Advertising Research Foundation opens its 75th Anniversary Annual Convention this week, it is fitting to take another look at the discipline of research and measurement in the context of today's vastly changed MediaTech environment. And guess what? It's sexy. It's hot, it's where creative thinking is required and is being applied to address the issues vexing CMOs and their agencies all over town. Really?