Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Relevance

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Building Interest Paths that Create Flow

    As the intelligent and real-time web dynamically distribute content everywhere, understanding and creating interest paths will move to the forefront of marketing strategies. Pushed aside will be ideas of siloed marketing strategies to stages in the funnel. Right now we concentrate our online marketing strategy in two places for search, contextual & display. One day…

  • Menus as Landing Pages

    While at SES San Jose to speak about Landing Page Utopia I had stopped at In-N-Out Burger in Sunnyvale. Being an East Coast guy who does not frequent this establishment I was, as always, struck by the simplicity of their menu. Certainly their menu helps optimize both the ordering process for customers and the fulfillment…

  • 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…

  • The Psychology of Optimization

    I saw this presentation from Tara Hunt on Dave Kellogg’s blog. Dave is CEO of Mark Logic where they are doing some amazing things with XML and content management. In any case, this preso is exceptional. It touches on a number of optimization factors that I feel very strongly about and incorporate whenever possible, namely…

  • The Dawn of Semantic Ads

    Peer39 announced Friday their release of SemanticMatch™ ad technology. A few months ago I had an opportunity to preview SemanticMatch with Peer39’s CMO James Oppenheim. It further validated for me the value that is created using semantic technology to deliver relevant content in a context that will create consumer intent. This announcement follows on the…

  • The Sleeping Giant: Ad Factors in Conversion Rates & ROI

    If you’ve done multivariate tests across AdWords to a single landing page in order to optimize the ad you know a little known truth about conversion rate optimization from media that not many realize. The ad creative (alone) can have an enormous factor of influence on conversion rates. I’ve also seen results from multivariate tests…

  • Using APIs to Mashup Ads & Landing Pages

    After a decade optimizing landing page after landing page and tons of websites there are two things that I can always count on to improve conversion rates. One is giving users more control to refine their intent in contextually relevant ways. The other is bringing the products or services closer to users in their experience.…

  • 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.…

  • How Semantic & Intelligent Web are Changing Advertising

    Alex Iskold at ReadWriteWeb has a post on Semantic Search: “The Myth and Reality” that for the first time made me able to clearly express the benefits of semantic search succinctly. My comment on his post: The value in semantic search is simply about creating ontologies that allow for results refinement that can deliver a…

  • Macy’s Magical Online Disappearing Act

    In today’s Wall Street Journal Macy’s CMO and Chairman of the Online Division Peter Sachse talks about Search Marketing. It’s rare to hear a CMO of a major retailer discuss search marketing so it was with great interest that I read his comments. WSJ: How do you measure the effectiveness of search marketing? Mr. Sachse:…

  • Expert Guide to Multivariate Testing Success

    I’ve been doing MVT for three years across landing pages and websites with over 40 clients like Citibank, Disney, Esurance, H&R Block, Inuit, Microsoft and T-Mobile. As the Founder & former Chief Strategy Officer of OTTO Digital, the services division of the market-leading MVT tool, Offermatica (now Omniture Test&Target) I’ve authored many case studies on…

  • Multivariate Test Results: Confidence, Stability & Determining a Winner

    Getting your MVT tests designed, developing your creative and implementing code are all just precursors to getting your test live. However, once your tests are live success will be determined by how well you did all those things. At this point you are just monitoring results – so relax and kick your feet up…if only…