You have to commend the Wall Street Journal for assigning the resources and churning out the investigative pieces as part of the "What They Know" series. But I thought they missed a lot of things.

For example, didn't they forget Google?

The series of articles goes on at length about cookies, with much detail about data aggregation firms such as BlueKai and [x+1], and the way advertisers target you through your browsing. But there wasn't much in depth about the bigtime data machines like Google or Bing and where that will go in the future -- such as location-based tracking and artifical intelligence. 

There is a lot of buzz, hype, critical analysis, and downright drivel out there about trends in marketing and ad spending. Some have even asked whether advertising is dead. They're wrong.

Advertising is not dead folks, it has become more vibrant and complex than ever. It's growing in the online world where aggressive metrics and analysis demand instant accountability.

Here's an experiment: Try to go the next five minutes without seeing some kind of add. Ooops, too late, already happened, right?

In the Q4 of 2009, online advertising hit a new all-time quarterly high of $6.3 billion. What's changing about advertising is that its morphing, and the metrics and data used to track it are becoming more sophisticated than ever.

Take the famous "Cog" ad by Honda. Reportedly took $6M and more than three months to develop this high-concept, cross platform viral video ad. It got lots of media attention too: