Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Branding

  • I’m YouTube Bitch… and Content is a Hell of a Drug!

      “Veoh or some other online video aggregator is going to be more important than NBC in 10 years”      - Michael Eisner, 11/22/08, New York Times “After Disney, Eisner Finds a Home Online” Eisner is right, but it will be YouTube. In case you missed it Friday night, YouTube (again) staked its claim as the future…

  • Semantic Advertising in Action

    Congrats to Eran, Jon and everyone at Dapper on the official release of MashupAds and some great press yesterday on RWW and TechCrunch The video below is a great overview of the power of this semantic technology to deliver relevance and exemplifies why RAMP is working so closely with Dapper to create new forms of (and platforms for)…

  • J. Crew Wins in Search with Michelle Obama

      In one of the smarter ad campaigns I’ve seen lately and a campaign only possible with the real-time relevancy of search and content targeting, J. Crew is running ads that create interest and intent around Michelle Obama, her style choices and J. Crew’s products. Here is the ad on a Michelle Obama query (click…

  • The Two Modes of Delivering Relevance: Value Ad & Net-New

    Yesterday with much excitement I dove headfirst into two new tools. Glue from AdaptiveBlue and LinkedIn Apps. Both provide for the distribution of relevant content into social media — or if you prefer, the distribution of relevant social media into content. Glue is a FireFox extension that provides social context to content while LI Apps…

  • The Road to Nowhere: Behavioral Targeting Still Sucks

    This post is inspired by and repurposed from my recent comments on the great blog of Jim Novo.   From my experience profile creation by cookie, also known as chasing people around the web, is not an effective practice for performance minded advertisers (and isn’t that everyone now?). It is a bad strategy to guess where…

  • Display Becomes Us

    Scott Rafer gets it. I don’€™t know Scott, though I think we both spoke at CommunityNext and WidgetWorld Expo over the past year. In any case, his thoughts on the Lookery blog capture an important point that deserves an exclamation. “The increasing marginal returns of search advertising are now doing more than taking market share…

  • Lessons in Ad Persuasion from Aristotle

    In digital advertising persuasion is becoming more difficult, complex and valuable. Often, I find it helpful to strategize persuasive techniques for clients by going back to the originator of this thought, Aristotle. Two and a half years ago an early post on this blog discussed Artistotle’s concept of Kairos (timing) and how it could persuade…

  • AdMonsters Keynote: Can Display Advertising Survive the Web?

    This past Thursday in New York I gave the keynote address at the AdMonsters Leadership Council. If you’re not familiar with AdMonsters they are not monsters at all, but a fantastic professional organization for people in ad operations. What is Ad Operations? These are the smart people in the world of display. Ad ops traffic…

  • OMMA Global: Why Semantic Advertising Will Save Display

    The following is rough transcript of my opening statements as moderator/presenter on this panel. I’ve also included my slides on the overview of the semantic advertising ecosystem for display and how each of the companies that were part of this great session (Dapper, RAMP, Peer39) are represented in it. The second part of the slides…

  • Metallica Optimizes B(r)and for Digital

    There are great content distribution lessons to be learned by watching the digital music space. Likewise, these content creators can also teach us quite a bit about brand building. A short piece in Brand Republic about Metallica’s new album caught my attention. I was especially interested in the excerpt below. It touches on optimizing the…

  • Landing Page Utopia: 7 Lessons from Google

    At Search Engine Strategies in San Jose last month I delivered a presentation for the session Landing Page Utopia off an idea I had previously blogged – that the Google homepage is the greatest landing page ever created. The presentation reviewed seven strategies Google employs and discussed how they benefited both Google and their audience.…

  • McCain Wins Landslide Over Obama in Search Engine Marketing Election

    During the pre-primary season I took a look at how the candidates were doing with SEM. The results were not pretty. Today, more than a year later, after both party conventions are over and the race is on I decided to revisit the SEM landscape of the Presidential election. Once again the results surprised me.…

  • September Speaking Gigs: OMMA Global and AdMonsters Keynote

    At OMMA Global I’m excited and honored to be moderating and speaking on the first Ad industry conference panel ever on Semantic Advertising. Joining me are the two leaders of this emerging technology. Why Semantic Ads Will Save Display Friday 9/19 4:15pm – 5:00pm Session Description: Semantic technology is quickly redefining display advertising by creating…

  • RAMP Digital’s Semantic Dockers Ad Featured on MediaPost

    I’m proud to share a great write-up from Tameka Kee at MediaPost around a very successful campaign we worked on with Blackbag Advertising and Dockers using our Semantic Ad Applications which we’ve now formally productized and named RAMPS (short for Relevance Amplifiers). There are a few metrics in the article however they weren’t even the…

  • How Semantic Ad Apps Deliver Relevance to Implicit, Explicit & Latent Intent

    Every online endeavor starts with a goal. In search that goals is often explicit. In content that goal becomes much more implicit. What’s important to note is that just because a person is in content it doesn’t mean their goal is lost or not as important as it was in search. People spend much more…

  • Mashing Up the Value of Ads & Content

    What if online ads were so useful and informative that people actually came to content sites to see the ads as much as they did to see the content? Far fetched? Maybe not so far or fetched. We know that ads are a big draw for consumers around events like the Super Bowl and the…

  • Can Advertising Survive the Web?

    Reckoning A decade ago it was real easy for media companies, agencies and advertisers to simply transferred their revenue models online and “adify” the web with banners. Now comes word that the businesses that make their money from display ads are facing hard times. The fault of the economy? Nah, display ads do not work…

  • Gary Busey Viral Video Campaign Rawks!

    Congrats to my client GotVMail. The viral video campaign launched yesterday Gary Busey on Business is getting some great reviews and it’s only Day 2: Gawker Adfreak Make the Logo Bigger Here’s one of my personal favs. Rave on!

  • Viral Marketing with Video Widgets

    Since blogging is a key viral driver of Social Media Optimization I wanted to share our latest RAMP project. Working with GotVMail (as well as being a customer 🙂 RAMP helped strategize, build, deploy and optimize a widget and supporting experiences for their Gary Busey on Business viral marketing campaign being launched today. That’s right,…

  • Intelligent Web: Where Search & Display Advertising Meet

    This past Tuesday at SMX Advanced in Seattle, I presented my ideas and work relating to how the Intelligent Web will fundamentally change and realize the promise of digital marketing. In this post I expand the points and provide my presentation. Since the inception of online display advertising it has been mismatched with the web.…