Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Relevance

  • Webinar, Podcast & Speaking on Personalization, Targeting and Testing

    Over the next week I’ll be doing what seems like a quite a bit of evangelizing — hopefully it is more of a knowledge transfer than anything else. 3 Proven Approaches to Delivering Targeted Content – Webinar This is an Omniture webinar I had the pleasure of doing with Charlene Li of Forrester Research. Charlene…

  • Creating Intent in Digital Media – Part 2 & 3

    Part 1 focused on three types of digital media and cross-media and looked at what the future may hold for intent creation in each. Part 2 looks strategically at creating intent and Part 3 is a case study. Goals and Intentions For the most part, people are consistently in goal or intent (I use these…

  • Results from Facebook Ads

    On October 19th I launched my first Facebook ad campaign. The results reinforce a number of questions and concerns about the effectiveness of advertising in social media. Namely, using passive media tactics in an active media environment. Results Summary: Ok, that’s typical banner response. Here is the ad I ran. My target keywords were “advertising,”…

  • 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.…

  • Your Homepage Sucks – Use Landing Pages for Brand Keywords

    Recently we created and tested five different landing pages for brand specific keywords and ads. The winning page in this A/B/C/D/E test achieved a 148% increase in conversion rate. Taking the customer insights gleaned from the first test our follow-up multivariate was able to add an additional 15% lift in conversion rate and even more…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Ad Testing

    Ad testing can lead to huge increases in conversion rates. I don’t care if it is text based search ads, rich display and banner ads or video ads – all benefit site-side from advanced testing techniques done on the ads leading to these landings. We know marketing messages have a tremendous influence to persuade action.…

  • 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…

  • Behavioral Targeting is Not Just Banners

    Over the last year I’ve become immersed in the world of Behavioral Targeting (or BT as insiders refer to it). Of course, in many respects I’ve been doing BT for a long time. The key components that make up the qualitative and quantitative aspects of BT; segmentation, targeted creative, testing, and analytics are all built…

  • 7 Facts About On-Site Behavioral Targeting

    In advance of my speaking on Tuesday July 24, 2007 at MediaPost’s Behavioral Targeting Forum in New York City along with OTTO Digital’s Chief Creative Officer Paco Vinoly, I thought I would share some of the things we’ve learned to be true in doing Behavioral Targeting (BT). Fact 1: Behavioral Targeting isn’t new, nor is…

  • 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…