You'd kind of hope that when Time publishes its annual Time 100 list of the most influential people that just one of them would be from the advertising industry. True, people like Dubya and Oprah would rank higher on anyone's list, but shouldn't an industry whose whole raison d'etre is to influence be capable of producing just one super-influential person? No, per Time. In a metric that may be a proxy for how the industry is doing these days, here's what it has been reduced to: a fawning piece in the issue written by Donny Deutsch about Google global sales and business development chief Omid Kordestani (pictured here), whom Deutsch describes as "the main brains behind Google's innovative and aggressive push to reach deals with a multitude of partners and make big money through advertising." (In fairness to Donny, all 100 profiles in the issue are fawning, which is the point.)

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor