Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Display

  • The Antidote to Chaos – Build & Deliver

    Jeff Jarvis has a post in The Guardian that echoes two key strategic ideas I’ve been harping on the past few months. 1. Companies need to build marketing and communications platforms themselves to connect with consumers. 2. Companies need to serve themselves and advertisers better by delivering more relevance. These strategies are not mutually exclusive.…

  • iPod Touch Commercial – Democratized Creative Hits Prime Time

    In case you haven’t seen it here is the new iPod Touch commercial that was created by an 18 year old Apple fan Nick Haley from the UK, put on YouTube, discovered by Apple and is now being used for a National Television Campaign. Nick mashuped some video from apple.com, added a soundtrack and edited…

  • Creating Intent in Digital Media

    In Part 1 I will look at three types of digital media and cross-media and see what the future may hold for intent creation. Next week in Part 2 I will focus on using creative and technology in synergy to optimize intent creation. The idea of creating intent is one of the touchstones of marketing…

  • Google vs. Facebook – Who Will Know More About You?

    “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?‘” – Eric Schmidt, Google CEO May, 2007 Never underestimate Google. After driving the price of Microsoft’s investment up with what I believe was little real intention of partnering…

  • Google Using Maps API Key to Extract Content

    I’m working on building a LAPP (landing application) for a client and I noticed something incredibly interesting. The landing page uses the Google Maps API to deliver an added layer of relevance on the landing page by delivering a map experience to the user. Since it’s currently in dev the page has no links to…

  • Facebook Flyers Pro Taking Off

    Over the past month Facebook launched its Flyers Pro CPC (cost per click) advertising solution. This adds CPC advertising to Facebook’s existing Flyers Basic CPM solution, their Microsoft banner solution and sponsored deals. Whatever deal FB is about to announce tomorrow their valuation is sure to be helped by the very existence of Flyers Pro.…

  • Two Days in the Facebook Gold Rush

    I spent the past two days in Silicon Valley immersed in the world of Facebook Application Developers (I can’t resist the temptation to call them FADs) and Venture Capitalists. This culture shock was courtesy of being invited to speak on Metrics & Targeting at the awesome CommunityNext Platform Conference. Congrats to Noah Kagan and Andrew…

  • Don’t Wait for Social Network Ad Models

    Social Networks (SN) are desperate for strategies to monetize and advertisers are desperate for ways to reach this huge highly engaged audience. However, it may be that because of social network behavior that most ad models in social networks will not work or worse, run the risk of destroying what users love about them. Can…

  • The Relevance Delta: Madison Avenue and Google

    Andy Berndt’s departure from O&M set the tone for Advertising Week. If you were present at MIXX and OMMA and wanted to find out how advanced advertising has become you were in the wrong place. I direct you Mountain View, California where they are eating Madison Avenue’s lunch. What I saw the last few days…

  • Advertising Week 2007

    Next week I’ll be at what is referred to as “Advertising Week” here in New York City. On the Digital side OMMA and MIXX have their shows scheduled right against one another. Last year I spoke and attended OMMA. I was a bit disappointed with the show however my presentation from it; Optimizing Content Pages…

  • Why Mashups are Mandatory for Marketers

    No longer is the web about sites. It has become a database platform with lots of structured information. This change is profound. The strategic and creative use of this structured data (from REST APIs) is changing the way we interact with the web… and for the better. Deeper and more engaged user interactions are taking…

  • Optimization of Ads & Landing Pages by Keyword Match Type

    Exact Match, Broad Match, Phrase Match – Understanding Relevance and Unlocking Higher ROAS With the advent of quality scoring for ads understanding of match type has never been more important. I’m not referring to understanding how match type works from an ad serving perspective but understanding how match type drives clicks with different goals and…

  • A Digital Marketing Lesson from Wall Street’s Woes

    As the New York Times points out in Sunday’s Business section the recent collapse of the stock and bond markets has much to do with the automated black-box systems of hedge funds whose algorithms are seeing behavior that despite all their statistical modeling has no precedent. The automated systems have failed and it’s now people…

  • Jay-Z & Rocawear Lay Down the Viral Video Marketing Beat

    I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell I am a hustler baby, I’ll sell water to a well – Jay – Z from “U Don’t Know” In the lyrics to “U Don’t Know” from Jay-Z’s monumental September 11, 2001 release The Blueprint (amazingly one of the other top three albums from…

  • Testing & Personalization Kill Best Practices

    Back in October of last year I wrote about lazy marketing or deciding to implement creative and design strategies based on so called best practices. Last week MarketingShepa published a case study of work we did with a client on button testing that once again proved that even for buttons, best practices need to give…

  • Monday Morning – Are You Changing the World?

    OTTO Digital CEO Jamie Roche has a great blog post about what inspires great businesses and what is holding back greatness with most companies today. It’s based on a string of recent interviews Jamie conducted with folks who all left the same (major media) company for the same reason. After being pitched the idea that…

  • 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…

  • The Search Engine Election: 2008 Presidential Campaign Scorecard

    The immense power of search engines to reach people and influence behavior based on information discovery intentions is beyond debate. Still, with the 2008 Presidential Election little more than one year away the ability to quickly find relevant information on the candidate’s views and positions from the search engines, namely Google, is extremely poor. The…

  • 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…