Category: Relevance
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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…
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Ads as Content – Content as Ads
It is hard to believe but we are ONLY 5 years into search advertising reaching critical mass. In the blink of an eye it has emerged as one of the world’s most disruptive and successful technology initiatives. Google alone made over $20B in revenue from it last year. For me the key takeaway for the…
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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…
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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).…
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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…
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Speaking, Moderating and Hosting a Clinic at SES Chicago
Chicago is my favorite SES because it's such a great town and the show always has a heavy conversion rate focus. This year I’ll be quite involved on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (December 9th-11th) at Search Engine Strategies Chicago so if you are going to be there and would like to connect please contact me.…
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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)…
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Using Keywords for Display Ad Relevance
One of the most exciting things about the move to a Search OS in Display is the use of keywords for ad and content targeting. Sure, keywords have always been used in contextual ads but often results are poor with no disambiguation or optimization over the delivery (e.g. just check this button and we’ll…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Think Like a Search Engine – APIs & User Control
There are two powers I feel are essential to unlocking the future of relevance in digital marketing. 1) The power of user control 2) The power of information correlations This is not new. You may have noticed the past few months that I keep referencing Google in my writing and presentations on this subject.…
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Spitting in the Face of Pessimism
If you are an entrepreneur in online advertising and you don’t see this economic downturn as good news, then your business model is fundamentally flawed. All the pessimism I am reading seems to be coming from investors and entrepreneurs involved in businesses that have poor models. Did they learn nothing from the first .com bubble?…
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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…
Optimize & Prophesize 