This morning, I attended the Oxford Economics World Outlook Conference here in San Francisco. The title of the presentation given by the global forecasting consultancy was "Deeper Crisis or Turning Point: What lies ahead for the global economy?"

"What does lie ahead?" you ask with baited breath....

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...

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.

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.

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'm speaking on a panel on the Top 10 Digital Trends this Tuesday at 4pm at the Hotel Nikko at the Digital Edge conference put on by BtoB Magazine. 

What am I going to say? Here's some high level thoughts....

Yesterday, I shuffled over to the Radisson to catch one last session at SXSW put on by our pals over at ThoughtWorks. Rather than make us sit in front of another yet panel of speaker, the ThoughtWorkers came up with a great exercise to make their case for using an agile over a waterfall approach to experience design.

We built a zoo.

Yesterday, I dropped in on a panel moderated by Christine Friar, the humor editor from Huffington Post to learn about "What the internet finds funny."

The answer? Mostly cat videos.

I haven't even landed in Austin for SXSW yet, but already I'm caught up in the frenzy.

This morning, American Express has raised the bar for marketers trying to make a splash at a major cultural event.

To announce their new Twitter program, AmEx is throwing a Jay Z concert on Monday and giving away free tickets to SXSW attendees.

History proves that everything must come to an end—that is just the nature of things. It's a universal constant. Species go extinct, tools become obsolete and empires fall. Though until the last hundred years, successful technologies traditionally had a much longer lifespan.