A New Yorker cartoon: A man and his young son walk up to an ice cream truck on the street corner. The vendor is an Eskimo. The man and his son request a snow cone. The vendor responds, "You have to be more specific - my people have more than four hundred different words for snow cone."

Helping to navigate the expected wild swings in local TV advertising inventory for the political season, pay TV provider advertising sales company Viamedia and media measurement company Rentrak recently announced a political advertising planning tool. Using Rentrak's Advanced Demographics, the tool was developed to plan, purchase and manage TV inventory for the 2016 political season. It can show where ad inventory will be in highest demand, allowing political and other marketers to shift media dollars to other areas.

If memory serves me well, back in the mid-1950s two opposing media research forces were vying for hegemony over the naming and defining rights for a "media market," a static, physical piece of property that was defined by many characteristics, such as number of people, homes, education, families, dwelling, income, boundaries, occupation, that would stretch continuously in many shapes and sizes across the United States. The two top contenders were ADI (area of dominant influence) and DMA (designated marketing area). My understanding is that somehow Nielsen Media Research won the coin toss, and DMA it has been ever since.

Recently, Charlene Weisler and I allowed some of the prominent programmatic TV players to speak for themselves rather than through our vivisection of their value proposition. We started with data-ists Rentrak and Oracle Data Management Platform. This week we'll continue with platforms TubeMogul and Videa.