Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Applications

  • Offermatica’s Behavioral Targeting by Personal Affinity

    Back in January I posted the great results OTTO Digital was having with clients using Offermatica to behaviorally target content based on user defined affinity and the advantages this solution has over classic BT technology employed on the ad serving side of the world. Things have gone so well using this technique (also known as…

  • The Rise of Widget & Application Optimization

    The opening of platforms has created amazing opportunities to create compelling experiences fueling the rise of widgets, mash-ups and applications over the past year with no end in sight. In this new era of integrated applications at every digital touchpoint, users will have more avenues than ever from which to engage. What seems lost in…

  • Engaging Users on the SERP – How Google Universal Search Changes Everything

    If you haven’t noticed over the past few weeks there has been a sea change on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Universal Search is what Google calls it but it’s much more than search. At its core it creates an entirely different engagement dynamic and search user experience. Until now the goal of Google’s…

  • Targeting the Two Intentions of Users

    The benefit to understanding intent lies in targeting. Targeting ads, tags, copy, images or creative to source or behavior and whether in-session, in-site or retargeting is a proven and highly effective optimization strategy. Targeting will continue to drive the growth of digital marketing for the foreseeable future because it does one thing really well. Deliver…

  • Flash Forward: Six Examples of Optimizing Flash Video for User Engagement

    As engagement becomes a more valuable and measurable metric (and we know through many test across verticals that increasing engagement leads to increased conversion and page views) optimizing flash video movies and other rich Internet applications (RIA) like Ajax become critical. I’ll explore Ajax optimization in an upcoming post. This post was prompted by a…

  • Why You Must Exceed User Expectations

    Apple has an automatic pause of the track when the iPod is playing and your headphone plug comes out of the jack. The first few times this happened to me the pause was unexpected, but I was psyched each time I plugged back in and didn’t miss a beat. In fact, it didn’t really occur…

  • Speaking at NFAIS

    It’s with great privilege that I was asked to speak at the NFAIS (National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services) annual conference in Philadelphia next week on Tuesday the 27th. The conference title is Creating Change: Opportunities for Growth in the Wake of Disruption. My presentation is: Web 2.0: Maximizing Content and the User Search…

  • The Sphere of Information Distribution & Consumption

    It’s a simple truth: we gravitate toward the information we are interested in. This information sits in many different places. We access it in many different ways and we use it in infinitely more ways. In the online world these 0s and 1s are the window to our life. Information on the work we do,…

  • Dawn of the Video Search (& Ad) Age

    Quietly, as if it occurred while you were sleeping over the past few years search relevancy has improved. The combination of increased algorithmic accuracy plus an abundance of additional data and content have made this possible. Long gone are the days you could and would go from engine to engine and try your query in…

  • R.E.M. Reshaping E-Metrics (or Revolutionizing E-Marketing)

    Marshall Sponder’s blog WebMetricsGuru had a post with comments from a recent Eric Peterson’s e-consultancy interview that caught my attention. The conversation is about the present difficulties for analytic vendors and display advertisers in the face of rich-internet applications (RIAs) and feeds as they continue to proliferate on the web. Sorry if I don’t shed…

  • Social Media Optimization & Branding

    Pathways to Experience Your brand value is in large part made up of the many different experiences your users have with it. The value increases as more new users have good experiences and your existing user’s expectations are met. Our job as marketers is to create the awareness and expectations that feed user desire to…

  • Is it Real? YouTube’s “lonelygirl15”

    Brilliant Hoax, Marketing Genius, or UGC Savant? Whatever ends up happening with “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=lonelygirl15 “>lonelygirl15” it will be a fascinating study of online marketing prowess in the nascent world of user generated content (UGC) and social-media. If you’ve become a fan of YouTube as I have then you probably know who she is. Her two-minute…

  • The Quality of Web Analytic Data. Or, why you need to be doing High Impact Segmentation

    Avinash Kaushik of Intuit had a great post recently on the poor quality of web analytic data. A side story to me was how much better the amount and quality of data we have for online marketing is over every other measured medium. As we look more and more towards this data and the quality…

  • Microformats and Marketing 3.0

    Microformats may be the most exciting and important project currently being advanced in the next generation of the web. This is beyond Web 2.0 to 3.0. Yet, like many of the great web 2.0 advances it is rooted in ideas that have been around for a long time and microformats are already in practice. Technorati…

  • Creative License is Dead. Long Live the Customer

    With all the talk about Advertising moving towards a more measurable and quantifiable future one thing that is almost always overlooked is the impact this has on creative design. The design skills and process necessary to execute great ad creative are changing. So too will be the role designers play in the ultimate success of…

  • Relevant Design

    Made possible through the use of front-end and back-end web 2.0 technologies, Relevant Design merges the best values of persona based design with those of goal based design. Relevant Design is an executable platform with its own methodology to test and deliver targeted messaging to the goals of specific personas. Relevant Design creates unique rules…

  • Buttonator

    Anyone that has worked with me knows I have a thing for buttons. I’ve long felt that the button is usually the single most important part of optimzing a page for conversion. Location, color, size, message are all important elements that can increase (or decrease) conversion rates. I’ve seen even slightest variation in location be…

  • Search Players & Ajax

    Google’s Ajax SDK release last week recieved little fanfare. Am I the only one that thinks this is big news? Google of course understands the ways that Ajax is forever changing the way people use the web. With the release of Yahoo’s new heavily Ajaxed tech section we may be seing a new and interesting…