Last week I was in San Antonio, Texas, home of the Alamo, at the first-ever iMedia Video Summit. It was a great event with some of the smartest people in the industry and the excitement about online video opportunities was palpable.

Here are the top 3 things that were the major themes of the event...

I was interviewed this week at ad:tech San Francisco by Allvoices.com. They asked me what the future holds for advertising agencies. Watch this video and see what I had to say.

Traction is an office of connoisseurs. It informs how we work, how we play, and most especially how we eat.  From Glenn's to-die-for lemon meringue pie to Kele's home-brews to Julie's delectable cheesecake to Adam BBQ obsession we're an office that loves fine food and drink. We're also an office that loves cutthroat, blood-thirsty competition. Hence our quarterly Traction Cook-Offs.

Our CEO Adam Kleinberg has made it his priority to delve into the concept of gamification and it's ramifications for our industry. The only thing he likes more than writing and discussing gamification is writing and discussing whyeveryone hates you (and how you can change that).  So before you check out for the Cinco de Mayo weekend, make sure to catch his IAA West panel discussion on gamification taking place May 3rd at Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco.

We are looking for a Lead Front-End Developer to join our team.  This position will be the primary architect on the front-end structure, lead meetings, instruct other team members, ensure the code is of the highest quality, and be the primary technical point of contact for the client's back-end development team. Candidates should have prior experience leading advanced front-end projects.

Which are you?

In the past decade, two massive shifts have reshaped marketing.

1) For the first time, we're able to measure the effectiveness of our marketing

2) Relentless financial superpressure from the turbulent economy

The result is that there has been a relentless focus on measuring ROI in marketing. Unfortunately, that has led to an unfortunate trend:

Brands are becoming commodities.

Last week, I was one of 35 marketing professionals invited to the San Francisco Videonomics event up high on the 32nd floor of the Westin Sf. Francis. There were microphones at every seat, a nice touch that made the session a true collaborative summit and made every attendee part of the conversation.

Nielsen presented and shared how it was deriving their new version of digital GRPs. The speaker made the point that big budget marketers were "the customer"when it came to buying media and that's why it was necessary to have a digital GRP. 

If you're familiar with this argument, you'll think it obvious that there was quite a bit of disagreement from the crowd. 

Nielsen has a point, however...