Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Display

  • Dynamic Segmentation (La Nouvelle Vague)

    I’ve always loved segmentation. One of the keys to the success of my first web business and the number one reason we survived the dotcom bubble was that we segmented our email list like crazy. Every supplement purchased qualified you for a segment. We knew the categories you were interested in and what products within…

  • Launch Interviews on Yieldbot

      I realize that not everyone follows me or yieldbot on twitter so I wanted to post links here to recent interviews I've done surrounding the launch of yieldbot. AdExchanger ExchangeWire  Hope you enjoy. I tried to go into great detail on our vision and execution. Publishers interested in getting into the yieldbot beta please contact…

  • Bounce Rates & Publisher Monetization from Search

    Bounce rate from natural search is a problem that has plagued publishers for a long time. It’s one of the problems we’re working on solving at Yieldbot. Many pubs spend a great amount of time and effort working on SEO to increase site visitors. The fruit of this labor is increased traffic to pages relevant…

  • 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…

  • Links vs. Cookies: A Tale of Two Web Economies

      I credit Jonathan Strauss of link analytics company awe.sm with coining the phrase “the link as the cookie.” I’ve been borrowing that expression for the past year because it not only describes his service and the meta concept of linked data, but it also encapsulated what intelligent landing page optimizers had been doing for some time…

  • The True Media Value Delta

    The slide above is one I've been sharing with a select number of people in the industry the past six months. However, Fred Wilson's blog this morning on his personal experience with the inequities inherent in the current digital media landscape inspired me to share it publicly now.  What is it? This is data from…

  • 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…

  • SES Chicago Next Week

      Next week I’ll be speaking for my 5th year at SES Chicago. I feel privileged that the good folks putting on the show now and in the past have been gracious enough to keep inviting me back. The sessions I’ve spoken on through the years: 2005: Searcher Behavior Research 2006: Ads in a Quality Score World          Ad…

  • 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.  …

  • 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…

  • Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.

    For the past 15 years web analytics has been namely about one thing, counting. Counting is very important and as an industry we have become infatuated with it. Never before could a medium really count what was happening with it. Attributable media was and continues to be truly revolutionary. Attribution quickly formed the business models…

  • 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…