Despite the headline, this is not a commentary on the Middle East -- which makes me one of the few people not publishing uninformed opinion. Some years ago, the visionary CEO of a direct marketing agency approached a speaker's podium with the song, "Two Different Worlds" playing in the background. His message was simple: that direct-to-consumer marketing rests primarily on the principle of relevance -- and that principle was going to be increasingly important as mass media platforms gave way to more specialized digital platforms with unique communications characteristics and attributes. But he wasn't talking to direct marketers; he was …

Online advertising has been coming under a good degree of scrutiny lately, and television may not be far behind. As new technologies evolve to tell us more about who's watching what, it seems highly likely to me that one of these days some flavor of "Do Not Track" will be applied to the television platform. The question is, who among us will be prepared?

Thomas Jefferson's a busy guy for someone who's been dead for almost 200 years. His blog, Virginian Red, is one of the most-read on the eternal plain (www.virginiared.al - don't bother checking the url. Heaven has its own AL domain, which is only available in the afterlife). So to help honor Presidents' Day on Monday, with a bit of luck (and a few well-connected Facebook friends' help), I had the opportunity to sit down with our country's third President to talk about television, Snooki, and why America's not so bad as we roll on towards our third century.

Continuing on last week's discussion of Return Path Data, which is a more accurate term for what we tend to call Set-Top Box data, we now take a look at the term "Back Channel" also known as Back Path or Back Haul. It is the existence of the Back Channel that enables us to receive the data from its various source points. But the mere existence of a Back Channel is not a guarantee of receiving a full range of data gathered on the box. Some Back Channels, lacking bandwidth, do not have enough capacity to return a full range …

This evening, the world learns the answer to the burning question on everybody's mind: "Are the TV game shows of the future safe for humanity?" Personally, I believe all game shows are in jeopardy unless the producers and networks embrace the reality that it's not an IBM supercomputer that threatens to make on-air game show contestants -- and the genre -- irrelevant.

Last week Google and the ANA presented an impressive display of content and headliners in a wide-ranging discussion of, well, "tv and everything video" (the official name of the forum). I won't review the full day of events -- which was sold out -- but several observations are worth noting.

Content ruled again this past week, as AOL shelled out a cool $315 million for the Huffington Post and Rupert Murdoch launched The Daily. What does this mean for those of us in the traditional TV business?

CIMM's Set-Top Box Data Lexicon is a compilation of terms and definitions associated with Set-Top Box data and its measurement. This Word-A-Week column highlights a term and definition from the CIMM Lexicon. It is our hope that this will help in creating a common language for Set-Top Box data usage and help expedite the roll-out of the data for its many industry applications. We tend to use the term "Set-Top Box data" as the generic data term for all the data available in the hardware. But this is not as accurate a term as Return Path Data (also known as …

The announcement of Keith Olbermann's signing with Current TV this week unfortunately made me think about the world of Infotainment, or OpinionNews, or whatever you want to call it. Now, it's easy to dismiss such a move by Olbermann as one of either hubris or desperation. Is this an act of someone who believes himself bigger than the medium, like Howard Stern and his jump to Sirius? Or is it a grasp to stay relevant, taking his opportunity in one of the only venues that didn't have a non-compete clause in his deal with MSNBC? Will the right have Keith …

Somewhere along the way, the media masters that have kept the football portion of the Super Bowl content fairly safe and "super" have unfortunately learned to slowly look the other way while the advertisers and agencies whipped out their checkbooks. Some might even suggest that, as the promotions for their own network shows got racier, they've lost the ability to say "No" to a wide variety of increasingly, yet equally, offensive ads.