Traction CEO Adam Kleinberg was recently quoted in the Direct Marketing News article The Battle For Sexy. Focusing on the battle between creative and data; the article featured Adam's thoughts on the "sex appeal of data" and "ROA - return on awesome."

I'm writing this post on an airplane, watching President Obama's inauguration in real-time as I soar across the United States. 

I'm heading to NYC because I'll be speaking on a panel titled From Real-Time Bidding to a Real-Time Marketing Culture at the OMMA RTB conference this Thursday, January 24.

(...at 2:30pm at the Grand Hyatt if you'd like to come...)

2012 was a crazy year for advertisers. It seemed like there was a new trend, buzzword or meme to make sense of every week. And, of course, the good folks at Traction are dedicated to helping you understand them.

Here's a roundup of my 12 favorite stories we wrote in 2012.

I had a byline today in Ad Age today about why the mobile ad industry is failing. There's great targeting capability happening with "Big Data" but what value does it bring to advertisers?

After writing a post a few weeks ago called "Is Coke it?" on the new content-driven website for coca-colacompany.com, Ashley Brown, Coke's head of digital and social media reached out to me and invited me to write a follow-up story on the pages of Coca-Cola's very own web site.

Back in September, I had posted a sneak peak teaser video from Myspace starring one of the site’s major sponsors: Justin Timberlake. And if anyone could bring sexy back to the once major player in social media, it is definitely Justin.

I just got back from the iMedia Breakthrough Summit which was almost completely focused on mobile. Within the first 10 minutes of the conference, someone cracked the joke that "once again, this is the year of mobile!"

There are a zillion stats I could post (I won't bother) showing we all use smartphones to access the internet these days. But what does that mean for advertisers? 

It is pretty obvious that we are fans of the iconic work of Rankin-Bass studios, but it's not only their nostalgic stop-motion animation that we relish—it's also the sappy messaging that has shaped our lives and our business.

Which made us start to examine holiday TV specials and the lessons they teach.

I had a conversation with a potential client on Friday afternoon. She works for a technology company. A company with great technology in the cloud space. 

I asked her about the brand messaging. She told me three product attributes. We have great scalability. We have great customer service. Etcetera.

Coca-Cola has relaunched their corporate website as a content portal with, get this, actual great content. Some of it is about the brand, but some isn't. Should Coke try to be a magazine? Will it succeed?

Is this a brilliant move or insanity?