Advertising:

• If an impression occurs in a remote forest, does it cost more? No, it turns out, as an anecdotal assemblage of comments shows that advertisers don't put a premium on ads run behind paywalls.

International:

• Countries without a well-developed, liquid market in broadcast or other traditional media may find that they, Like Thailand, are seeing online and mobile advertising become the dominant branch, helped along with robotic buying.

Robot Invasion:

• The Gay Ad Network forsakes LGBT content creators, developing massive inventory through the use of targeting technologies pulling media from everywhere.
• Amazon is further rolling out its robot advertising platform… soon, we're told. No one has seen it, but it reportedly will allow regular punters, in addition to the trading desks, to buy ads that will be enriched in some fashion by Amazon's vast data collection.
• Agencies expect that - at least in the short-run - robotic ad bidding will reduce ad expenditures.
• Digiday went around looking for a publisher to say something nice about third-party sellers, like the robotic exchanges. They came up with nothing.

Social:

• Marketing Pilgrim points out that a recent Strongmail survey indicates that - for the first time since people thought to track it - fewer people are predicting that they will spend more on social media in some areas.

Data:

• With each human in the world responsible on average for 5 terabytes of data this year (50 times 2010's estimate), the future profile of a CMO may prove quite different than today's.
• Econsultancy offers an analysis of the trend as well.

Misc:

• The Brits put together a fun piece of schadenfreude showing the top 10 global marketing firm goofs of 2012.

Search:

• Google again shows that it is a company unprepared for product forays requiring it to deal directly with consumers. On the other hand, if the Robot Empire does continue consumer-facing sales efforts and becomes good at it, advertisers and search partners may benefit.

Major Players:

• The first rule about going negative is to pretend you're not going negative, something Microsoft is very bad at.