We live in a world where hip creative directors are being positioned against ad monitoring technology that is able to create and serve the best-performing ad... regardless of how lacking it may be of creativity and a big idea.

It's the time of the year when brands are glued to their social media analytics to try and decipher if the millions of dollars spent for a 30-second spot was extended, enhanced and otherwise optimized by the traction that it may (or may not) have received in the social media space. But, here's the thing: what were the best two ads you remember from last year's Super Bowl? Any idea? Did it roll off the tip of your tongue? Are you currently a valuable customer of theirs?

With complex statistical techniques, and a quickly expanding universe of data drawn from an increasing number of our behaviours online and offline, a multitude of organizations and institutions are using predictive analytics to do that which has always fascinated and eluded the human race -- predict the future.

In short, everything that you thought the Internet wasn't about in a world of 140 character tweets, Facebook status updates and YouTube viral video sensations. These deep and rich treasure troves of content are also gaining mainstream attention, and it all seems to be drawing more and more energy towards podcasting: a medium that many have already written off.

Last week, comScore released a white paper titled "The Economics of Online Advertising," that looked at the state of online advertising. You may think that online advertising is the future, and that as media dollars shift to digital (because that's where the eyeballs are) that online will be able to better serve brands in terms of delivering higher relevancy with better metrics. It turns out, that after close to two decades since the first online ad was served, that our industry still has a ways to go.

Recently, a very senior marketing professional who works at one of the world's largest corporations was recounting a story of how they saw a postal truck outside of their corporate head offices in Silicon Valley, and every single parcel that was being offloaded from this truck was from Amazon. He thought to himself: "This is the what retail looks like in 2012."

The true humility and humiliation of social media is not what the web analytics tell us: it's what the audience does (or doesn't do) with the content. You can buy audience, links, and clicks, but you can't buy people who care and want to share whatever it is that you are doing.