Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Targeting

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • Landing Page Resolution: 800×600 vs. 1024×768

    While not one of the eternal questions of our time, what screen resolution to build your landing page is nevertheless always a key design consideration. Many factors weigh into this decision. What are the browser resolution settings for the majority of your users? How does the page appear on different resolution setting (e.g. where is…

  • Afterthoughts on SES San Jose

    SES San Jose 2007 started for me during the one-hour delay waiting for the gate to be fixed so I could board the Sunday night flight from Newark Airport. With all the Search knowledge waiting to get on board it was easy to kill the one-hour delay talking with Kevin Lee, Barry Schwartz and Tamar…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Importance of Relevance in Branding

    A great commentary in Forbes by Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak of Reason Inc on the upcoming iPhone launch that speaks to much of what I’ve said recently on branding in the digital age. One quote stands out: “A brand is neither a goal nor a means, but a result of consistent delivery against…

  • Afterthoughts on SES Latino

    It’s hard to pin down why I liked SES Latino as much as I did. Tropical destination? Short plane ride? Two-day format? Part of it might be the session I participated in. Targeting Spanish/Portuguese Search Ads by Demographics and Behavior had some of the best case studies and tips that I’ve ever seen shared in…

  • Skype Boosts Homepage Conversion Rate with Radical Simplicity

    Thanks to the informational heavy handedness of 1.0 design we have the opportunity at OTTO Digital to employ our Radical Simplicity™ methodology quite frequently to improve the performance of pages and enhance brand value. The way it works, simply, is to segment users and then strip the page to a single consideration and call to…

  • How Brand, Product & Community Influence Intention

    In my last post I wrote that all user intentions can be boiled down to one of two goals, discovery or recovery. To create marketing strategies for these intentions we must begin by understanding the way users think in the course of trying to achieve these goals. Users respond to what they know. This can…

  • Targeting the Two Intentions of Users

    The benefit to understanding intent lies in targeting. Targeting ads, tags, copy, images or creative to source or behavior and whether in-session, in-site or retargeting is a proven and highly effective optimization strategy. Targeting will continue to drive the growth of digital marketing for the foreseeable future because it does one thing really well. Deliver…

  • Flash Forward: Six Examples of Optimizing Flash Video for User Engagement

    As engagement becomes a more valuable and measurable metric (and we know through many test across verticals that increasing engagement leads to increased conversion and page views) optimizing flash video movies and other rich Internet applications (RIA) like Ajax become critical. I’ll explore Ajax optimization in an upcoming post. This post was prompted by a…

  • Brand Marketing in the Digital Age

    Brand is many things but at its core it is an emotional connection between a user and a product or service. That connection has its greatest impact at the experience level where an interaction between the user and the product or service takes place. So what is interactive marketing then if not branding? And how…