Data analysis is not easy. It takes years to get good at it, and once you get good at it you realize how much more there is to learn. That is part of the joy. You are always learning. You are always growing.

Now, the online ad industry - from the buyer and the seller's point of view - went to Boy Scout camp. We tied ropes and knots and we made them look like a noose and we hung around our necks and attached them to the rafters. Thus clicks became the dominant thing and we hung ourselves on them.

Most people think innovation is all about ideas, when in fact it is more about delivery, people, and process.

It really is time to call bullshit on ‘engagement’.

It really is time to call bullshit on ‘engagement’.

Magid Generational Studies, using data compiled by Advertising Age, has released an infographic breaking down media consumption by hour of day and generation.

A great user experience is the result of setting concrete goals that meet both user goals and business goals. Unfortunately, I have seen many teams kick off a project with nothing more than a goal of, “Let’s create a great UX!” While a noble thing to strive for, it’s not specific, actionable or measurable. It contributes nothing to the planning or design phases, and it is the UX equivalent of a motivational high-five.

So, then what do you see as the difference between content marketing and custom content?

These experiences are not just frustrating for us, but are bad for businesses as well. How bad? User Interface Engineering’s analysis of a major online retailer found that 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, 160,000 people requested their password every day, and 75% of these people never completed the purchase they started once they requested their password.

Email is, besides all its flaws, still the cornerstone of the Internet.

Learn to talk SMAC

Every trade needs a standard vocabulary to refer to its environment, users, actions, products and results. Surprise, social media didn’t have one! So we took the bull by the horns, collected over 200 terms that we’d seen or used, and then edited, sorted and defined the list. The result is documented here, on the SMAC Wiki. As our industry grows, we will continually review and add those terms that reach a critical mass of usage.

We invite you to be part of the process! Learn to use these terms properly; share them with your colleagues; and by all means, give us feedback. The SMAC Standards Board reviews all submissions and publishes approved terms with proper credit.

The National Museums of Scotland have become the first major museum organization in the world to fully implement HMTL5.

Museum digital media tech manager Simon Madine explained in a blog post that the implementation across the five allied sites was married to an overall redesign. That redesign saw the site gain color and shoulder-room and emphasize more visuals. But the implementation of HTML5 is more revolutionary. It allows a greater level of search engine accessibility, easier rendering across browsers and overall makes it easier to elegantly add and change site content.

[The social software space has ballooned into a disparate set of technologies, data types, and over 1000 vendors confusing buyers. Despite the explosion of innovation, expect a 'Social Business Suite' to appear that consolidate many of these features for enterprise buyers]

he result of spreadsheet based media plans is that BILLIONS of dollars are wasted in depreciating properties. Every quarter, viewership and readership is going down at predictable rates. Current media planning enforces the waste of money on media that goes down in value every day because it reaches fewer potential customers.

1. Match Experience & Expectations

When using a product or service for the first time there is likely to be an element of learning needed to get to grips with it. This learning curve can often be an uncomfortable experience especially if the proposition doesn’t feel familiar.

Let's say you're walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, "we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you've been reading about took place on the next block.

The market displays this phenomenon right now.... here’s an example:

• A run of network campaign sells for 6 shekels
• That same campaign combined with declared (not inferred) age and gender data sells for 9 shekels

There’s a 3 shekel upcharge for leveraging the demographic data.

Facebook is run by Hackers

A month after joining, I asked another engineer when the next Hackathon would be, and he said “Whenever someone wants to organize it.” I went to my desk and emailed the company that I was going to hack the following night and, if anyone else wanted to join me, I would get food and drinks. The following night, we had a jam-packed Hackathon that generated lots of innovative projects and ideas. Zuck came to my desk the next day and told me how awesome the Hackathon had been, and it totally reconfirmed to me that I made the right decision to join Facebook.

I suggested they only invest in advertising and marketing that they could test, measure, and then scale what works. And that is Internet advertising. Not just search, but the whole ball of wax. Search, display, video, social, affiliate, and of course, audio.

It’s the Data, Stupid.

I have no idea how all of this will turn out. I can only see, from my experiences, that I've changed ... and I've had the device for a week. What happens when 40 million households have a similar and far more affordable device?

What is wrong with print ads?

Do you ever feel that too much of your day is spent on low-value activities that perhaps need to get done, but certainly don't require your level of experience or training?

The sellers price, in a perfect market, would reflect the potential quality of the product (piece of communication) they can deliver against the buyers objective. This leads to two major issues. First, there is no real way for agencies (or the marketers that pay them) to understand the effectiveness of their own campaigns, which leads directly to the second problem, that opacity in effectiveness creates a pretty serious market inefficiency: One side having a whole lot more information than the other (which leads to exploitation).

Let's use Open Table, a recent public company as our real world example in this post. Open Table (ticker OPEN) closed on Friday at $48.19 and has a "market value" of $1.1bn according to this page on Tracked.com. According to Google Finance, Open Table has 22.77 million shares outstanding. So to check the market value calculation on Tracked.com, let's multiply the market price of $48.19 by the shares outstanding of 22.75 million. My desktop calculator tells me that is $1.096 billion.

The rapidly shifting technology environment raises serious questions for executives about how to help their companies capitalize on the transformation under way. Exploiting these trends typically doesn’t fall to any one executive—and as change accelerates, the odds of missing a beat rise significantly. For senior executives, therefore, merely understanding the ten trends outlined here isn’t enough. They also need to think strategically about how to adapt management and organizational structures to meet these new demands.