I'm what you might call a second-generation marketer. My father started his professional marketing career with Data Terminal Systems back in 1974. As such, he has certain "old school" sensibilities about the theory and profession of marketing. For example, my father still professes that there is value in buying booths at trade shows, despite (or perhaps in spite of) people telling him that it's a dying practice. So I asked him why. He told me he keeps buying booths because of Pez. "Pez?" I asked. "Pez," he said. Then, as is characteristic of men of a certain age, he launched …

Online video advertising faces its own set of challenges, including audience fragmentation, piracy and the lack of a prevailing ad format. Exacerbating matters is the fact that in our over-eager state as salespeople, we tend to make mistakes that are bound to come back to haunt us. These include....

Where's Malcolm Gladwell when you need him? Someday soon we will reach a tipping point when even global events like the Olympics are truly multiplatform in a way that is both open-access and hugely profitable. I think the data NBC collected from the just-completed Olympics is a big step toward proving its value.

Since Shawn Fanning launched the original Napster about a decade ago, CD music sales dropped by 50%. Unfortunately, legitimate digital downloads recaptured less than half the total. Given steadily compounding improvements in computer, storage, and network bandwidth, videocentric media companies have been apprehensively awaiting the new media tsunami on their own shores. Many industry executives conclude it is now arriving. It appears their response is to (1) charge new incremental monthly fees and (2) increase existing ones. In short, after a decade to prepare, it looks like the industry's most imaginative solution is to raise prices.

Are the lines blurring, or am I just going cross-eyed? Google announced a number of Labs features that have been graduated out of the nursery test bed of gadgets and technologies into full-blown live features available to users of the mail interface. Chief among these new odds and ends is the ability to embed YouTube videos that will play directly within the Gmail webmail client.