Each company now competes hard to own the insight metrics around cross-media ad optimization, but they face skilled competitors and little chance of earning the same margins as produced by their currency business.

FORBES: Three Traits Of Winning Marketing-Insight Firms

Much of that investment will go toward converting shows into digital cable format, building an ad sales division and paying to beam programming cross-country by satellite.

FORBES: Why Grow Up?

We found that the winning combination for Little Pim was building tracking into every campaign, focusing on paid search, seeking new ways of reaching customers via advice from board and advisors and setting up cross-promotions instead of simply buying ad space.

FORBES: Marketing Mojo: Making $8K Look Like $120K

My question for the new policies is whether this will continue to be supported given the increasing importance of cross-service data to the overall Google ad ecosystem.

FORBES: Google Data Integration: Could It Drive PIDM Adoption?

Online ad company DoubleClick, Abacus' former owner, scrapped plans to cross-reference data about consumers' purchasing behavior with their online habits in 2000, when privacy advocates howled.

FORBES: Consumer Spy

In 1996, Newt Gingrich was in the cross hairs of Democratic ad makers who ran more than 800, 000 campaign commercials featuring the then-House speaker.

CNN: Republicans use Obama as the bad guy in negative ads