Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Branding

  • Repeal the Personalization Tax! Get Relevant with AI!

    Repeal the Personalization Tax! Get Relevant with AI!

    Personalization (or for my friends around the globe, “personalisation”) is having a moment. It might best be described as “frustration.” With higher media costs and increasing cost-to-acquire new customers brands desire customer segmentation across the customer lifecycle. This is so they can personalize marketing across channels to grow existing customer LTV.  Brands have invested in data…

  • The New Google Era

    Something has been happening on the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). It is the very thing that the FTC just closed the case on. It is the delivery on the promise that Larry and Sergey made from the beginning. That Google would organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. The keywords (pun…

  • End of the CPM Experiment

    The flag bearer of display advertising was always Yahoo. Their massive sales force stoked 15 years of equity into “the web banner.” Yahoo arguably had the greatest hand in providing the economic foundation for the entire web for many of its formative years.  That is why nothing better symbolizes the collapse of that foundation better…

  • Taste Graphs and the Future of User Controlled Media

    My friend Andy Weissman posted some really interesting ideas last week on the future of branded media that got me thinking. “we are moving to a world where almost everything is available, basically on demand. The problem for users in this environment is no longer "what CAN I watch" (or read or listen to). Instead,…

  • Talkin’ 2011 Publisher Revenue Blues

    "Well, I finally started thinkin' straightWhen I run outta things to investigate." -Bob Dylan It’s been a while since I’ve posted here at Optimize and Prophesize and even longer since I posted regularly. As has been the tradition here  in all but my first year blogging in 2006, I provide a yearly recap of my…

  • Optimize and Prophesize 2010 Highlights

    2010 was my fifth year of blogging and my second year on Twitter. My number of blog posts have continued to trend down the past few years, though my posts these days tend to be more thought out and longer – so hopefully the quality has gone up. I looked back on my blog posts…

  • Introducing the NML – The National Marketing League*

    Wouldn’t it be great if there were a professional marketing league? It could literally be the best media property in the world, NFL be damned. I know I would follow it very closely and even place a wager or two. Owners would form teams of digital marketers across different verticals. Team members could include marketers…

  • The Web is Not an Ad Supported Medium

    The web is the greatest marketing channel ever created but there is incredible irony in that. It was not created as a marketing channel. In fact, understanding that fact and even leveraging it is one of the best strategies you can undertake in online marketing. Seth Godin said it best two years ago and I’ve…

  • Online Advertising is Not an Intent Generation Channel

    Chris Dixon posted yesterday about Facebook and the ad channel they are trying to create with the Like buttons. He thinks they are building for top of the funnel Brand advertisers. The day of the big FB “Like” announcement I tweeted that Facebook was going to use these buttons to go head-to-head with Google on direct-advertising. It…

  • Display Advertising’s New Wave

    This week I was supposed to be in Amsterdam giving a presentation at Sanoma Uitegevers MediaParade event. As luck would have it a volcano erupted and forced me to cancel the trip. Below is the presentation I was really excited to give. It’s 45 minute talk, history lesson, state of the union and crystal ball…

  • The Market Value of Supply Side Data

    AdExchanger had a nice post from TRAFFIQ’s Scott Portugal about publishers using a Value-per-Customer metric for site visitors. As longtime readers know, I’ve been advocating publishers take this approach and measure site performance on revenue per visitor for years – most recently here. I especially liked this part of Scott’s post: “users interaction with a site…

  • Yieldbot is Born to Run

     Two years ago after Omniture purchased Offermatica and I started Relevance AMPlified (RAMP)  I stated three core principles of what I was doing next: 1.    Intent & affinity are the root segmentation strategies 2.    Achieve success w/ the most advanced technology 3.    Testing, targeting & optimization is our DNA These ideals are also evident in…

  • Display’s Matching Problem

    Simply put, advertising is a matching problem. It is a puzzle of people and needs, demand and awareness, creativity and messaging, and most of importantly, timing and context. It works best when the shape of the consumer fits perfectly with the shape of the advertiser. While conceptually this idea is not new  - advertisers have…

  • The Value of Search Ads for Brand Keywords

    On Search Engine Land today I saw a nice post on understanding the dynamics of Paid vs. Organic (or Natural) search. As David Roth explains it: What keywords are we really talking about? Those that match exactly with your brand name or branded product name, where there is generally no competition. So if you are Acme Widget…

  • Digital Spaces That Excite Me for 2010

    Last year I was very fortunate to meet some incredible people involved in shaping the future of digital media. I enjoyed learning about what interests them, hearing their points of view and discovering what problems they were working on solving. Needless to say, digital media evolves at an astounding velocity so I thought this was…

  • 2009 Recap: My Faves, Posts & Presos

    "A friend is one before whom I may think aloud." – Emerson 2009 was an amazing year of discovery for me and I tried to share as much of that here as I could. This year also presented a sea change in my writing because I started using a new communications platform, Twitter (you can…

  • Rising Tide of PPC Means SEO is Sinking

    With all current fuss about automated content for SEO I've found the recent changes by Google here and here have only greatly diminished the value of SEO for the most valuable keywords (those that have transactional value). Case in point is this SERP for "rifle scopes." This was a query used during my Ad Copy & Continuity…

  • Read All About It: Online News Has No Clue About Optimization

    I’ve been reluctant to write more about publishers issues with monetization having recently written pieces here, here, here and here but the recent spotlight cast by Rupurt Murdoch on Google’s traffic and sympathetic follow up pieces by respected writers like Tom Foremski and Michael Arrington have now boiled me over. Having spent the better part of a…

  • Optimizing Display Ad Creative for CTR & Conversion

    Most display advertising is still purchased on a CPM basis – you are buying a certain number of impressions. For that reason the higher percentage of clicks you get on your ad impressions the more cost effective your buying becomes. So ad creative is often the lynchpin to ROI. But it is very hard to…

  • Interviewed by AdExchanger

    If you are at all involved in display advertising AdExchanger.com is a daily must read. So I was really psyched when they wanted to interview me and that interview was published today. It covers what we are doing at RAMP Digital and my POV on the state and future of the digital ad industry.  …