There’s a brilliant article in Harvard Business Review, “Branding In the Digital Age“, on the new and necessary approach to media spend and paid vs owned vs earned media, among many many interesting things.
All media folks should read this. Brand and marketing folks may knock themselves out, too.

The rise of the marketing operations director
The complexity of modern marketing means companies are increasingly splitting marketing into operations and strategy, and increasingly they’re looking for marketing operations directors.

When marketing strategy is worthless
Imagine the following scenario: it’s the annual brand strategy seminar for a large, multi-national B2C company. The VP of Marketing goes on stage to present the new marketing model.

Marketing’s influence is not the goal, part 2
When marketers complain about the lack of influence at executive level they’re grabbing the wrong end of the stick.