Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Branding

  • People & Performance NOT Pages & Prices

    The following post was originally published as a guest post for the AdMonsters blog in advance of my speaking at their Leadership Forum. For more reading on the ideas contained here I also recommend this post and this post on Chris Dixon's blog. Fragmentation = Problems & Opportunities No one will argue that the Display marketplace is an…

  • Reaping The Ads You Sow

    Trends in search provide amazing intelligence. So much so that Google has provided a destination site with information even non-data junkies will find interesting. You can look at this data and understand two things about online marketing. TV drives a great deal of search inventory/demand/price/scale Getting media channels to work together can reap huge rewards Different…

  • Pubs Need to Get the Performance $ignal

      There is growing debate about the future of journalism and to a greater extent publishing in the digital age. The axis of the conversation is revenue generation or lack thereof. The problem in this space is one that frustrates me enormously because the answers are there. We know how to make money on the…

  • Recap: Search Becomes the Display Operating System

    "So yeah I sampled your voice, you was using it wrong/ You made it a hot line, I made it a hot song" – Jay Z, Takeover It was with the swagger that comes from presenting at my 5th SES in San Jose that I created a new presentation below for the session I put…

  • The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising

      Display advertising is at a crossroads. Its core foundation, the publisher, is crumbling. The latest technology advances are little more than band-aids that invite scrutiny. The channel that once seemed destined to define digital is latching onto as many operating principles from Search as it can. It might be time to make a deal with…

  • Audience: Display Advertising’s Cat in the Hat?

    Display advertising, which at one time looked like the web’s glorious channel is now a glory hole for direct marketing. In many respects brand advertisers have themselves to blame, not believing that a click is branding and fumbling around with poor microsite driven strategies that have zero ROI. The fact of the matter is an…

  • Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing

    This is getting tired. Recent comments by Jim Spanfeller and remarks at yesterday’s hearing on The Future of Journalism are just the latest show of disregard for the major changes that have taken place in the digital medium over the past five years. As Grove said about technology, only the paranoid survive. Publishers haven’t been…

  • Will New OPA Creative Sizes Help Redefine Display?

    I’ve been pretty adamant that new creative sizes were needed to help advertisers so when I woke up this morning to see the OPA has announced three new ad sizes I was thrilled. Clearly my excitement has not been matched by a lot a folks who see this as “shouting louder” and in fact if…

  • Interviewed by Aaron Wall at SEO Book

    Aaron Wall is a legend in SEO and his site SEO Book gets about 1 million uniques a month so I was really psyched when he asked to interview me. Aaron asked some really thought provoking questions and we covered everything from my career path, to what I’m working on now, to the future of…

  • Search Becomes the Display Operating System

    I first wrote about the idea of search strategies working in display to deliver more relevant ads two years ago. In the ensuing two years as followers of this blog know I’ve become passionate about the opportunity to build creative technology that makes display ads more relevant. One advantage I have working on these solutions…

  • Up Close with YouTube – SMX West

    I love YouTube and have written about it extensively on this blog so I was really excited to participate and present on this session at SMX. My highlight was hearing from Matt Liu, a pre-GOOG YouTuber about how YT is starting to tackle advertising. I really expect YT as a media and ad channel to…

  • @jonathanmendez now live on Twitter

    It took a year of observation but I’ve decided that even though I could continue working with and evangelizing APIs & real-time web and not be on Twitter, it was starting to feel weird. I mean c'mon, how would you feel buying a Mercedes then finding out the owner of the dealership drives a Pontiac?…

  • Speaking & Pushing the Envelope at SMX West

    I’m going back to Cali. Next week I’ll be in SF/SV with my primary purpose speaking and attending SMX West in Santa Clara.  Day one I’ll be on the panel Up Close with You Tube. What’s an optimization guy doing on this panel? Well it is not because of my fascination and bullish outlook with…

  • WTF? IAB Says Performance is a Bad Thing for Online Ads

    I was really interested this morning when I saw that the IAB is making an effort to combat "creative shabbiness" in display. Unfortunately it was not what I expected to read. As someone who has spent a decade building and optimizing creative for the web and has worked with six of the top eleven brands…

  • New York Times Landing Pages: All the Irrelevance That Fits the Pixels

    I’ve often used my hometown paper, The New York Times, to exemplify the disconnect between digital publisher content strategy, the goals of visitors and the resultant impact on advertising. The root of this disconnect is the way search, social media and the landing experience fracture content hierarchies. Behavior has changed and so too must the…

  • Optimize Randomness to Deliver Relevance

    The web is never ending path of recovery and discovery. This is what we’re optimizing! Yet we are wired for randomness. Radio, mix tapes, DJ’s, Pandora. Music proves our love of randomness. The sense of discovery fulfills a basic human need. We achieve further fulfillment from enlightening others to our discoveries. The question then becomes…how…

  • Favorite Thing: Posts & Presos of 2008

    "I think think, I think think, I think think, once in a while" -Paul Westerberg If you missed my blog this year or just want a quick summary of my favorite posts and presentations see below  - in full fledged chronological order! Presentations: On-Site Targeting: Crawl, Walk, Run Strategy AdMonsters Keynote: Can Display Advertising Survive the Web?…

  • 2008: The Year Search Won by a Knockout

    I started seriously working in Search back in the year 2000. Eight years ago display ruled the Internet world and "search" as a line item on the marketing budget did not exist. Those display people made lots of money and then it ended, for a time. The display bubble didn’t pop – it floated with…

  • Lessons in Digital Content Creation & Technology from Search Advertising

    Virginia Heffernan has an interesting piece in this Sunday’s NYT Magazine. The premise is that the new ways content is distributed and displayed calls for new types of content rather than trying to retrofit traditional content forms into the digital space. Of course this is true. Heffernan focuses her article on…well, article content (specifically magazines).…

  • Capturing the Gorilla: New Ways to Quantify the Value of Search

    There is an ever-growing delta between the metrics that are commonly used to gauge search success and the true underlying value search marketing delivers. There is a ton of ROI being left on the table – not because it isn’t being delivered but because it isn’t being measured and marketed. There are a few metrics…