Category: User Experience

  • Why AI-Native Segmentation Is the Future of Customer Data

    Why AI-Native Segmentation Is the Future of Customer Data

    At Neuralift AI, we believe that adopting an AI-native foundation for customer segmentation isn’t just a smart move—it’s the competitive advantage of your first-party data that your business needs to thrive in a data-driven world. Our application transforms how brands segment and engage with their customers by combining neural networks for segmentation and Generative AI…

  • Table Steaks: Customer 360 Made Easy

    Table Steaks: Customer 360 Made Easy

    The most important thing brands can do now is join their various customer data together into a single table with one row per customer. Call it a source of truth, a golden record, a master customer file, a C360 or a C180….call it whatever you want.  Keep it in the cloud, on your premises, in…

  • Repeal the Personalization Tax! Get Relevant with AI!

    Repeal the Personalization Tax! Get Relevant with AI!

    Personalization (or for my friends around the globe, “personalisation”) is having a moment. It might best be described as “frustration.” With higher media costs and increasing cost-to-acquire new customers brands desire customer segmentation across the customer lifecycle. This is so they can personalize marketing across channels to grow existing customer LTV.  Brands have invested in data…

  • Become Strategic with Customer Segmentation and Lift KPIs

    Become Strategic with Customer Segmentation and Lift KPIs

    The idea that different groups of people want different things within a product, category and vertical is as old as commerce itself. According to the Association of Consumer Research, customer segmentation started in ancient Babylonia. By the 19th century Germany book publishers would only publish new children’s books in late Autumn to be purchased as…

  • Goodbye Customer Data Platforms

    Goodbye Customer Data Platforms

    Last night Myles Younger shared the a16z primer The Rise of the Composable CDP. As I was reading I was confused when it was written. Composable CDPs rose about 2 years ago after the SaaS vendorscape of CDPs with their long integrations and high fees were platformed themselves by what they were running on, namely…

  • Always On – Marketing Use Cases for Streaming Data Apps

    Always On – Marketing Use Cases for Streaming Data Apps

    Marketing Cloud maturation means your Databricks, Snowflake, AWS, Azure and GCP instances are going to be more connected to real-time data streams and apps. For brands this data flows in the form of precious first-party data and unlocks a new world of marketing possibilities.  Data modeling, machine learning and real-time algorithmic decisions will become the…

  • The New Google Era

    Something has been happening on the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). It is the very thing that the FTC just closed the case on. It is the delivery on the promise that Larry and Sergey made from the beginning. That Google would organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. The keywords (pun…

  • End of the CPM Experiment

    The flag bearer of display advertising was always Yahoo. Their massive sales force stoked 15 years of equity into “the web banner.” Yahoo arguably had the greatest hand in providing the economic foundation for the entire web for many of its formative years.  That is why nothing better symbolizes the collapse of that foundation better…

  • Taste Graphs and the Future of User Controlled Media

    My friend Andy Weissman posted some really interesting ideas last week on the future of branded media that got me thinking. “we are moving to a world where almost everything is available, basically on demand. The problem for users in this environment is no longer "what CAN I watch" (or read or listen to). Instead,…

  • Talkin’ 2011 Publisher Revenue Blues

    "Well, I finally started thinkin' straightWhen I run outta things to investigate." -Bob Dylan It’s been a while since I’ve posted here at Optimize and Prophesize and even longer since I posted regularly. As has been the tradition here  in all but my first year blogging in 2006, I provide a yearly recap of my…

  • Building the Greenfields of Display

    1990 marked 1 million cellular phones in the U.S. (there are over 300 million today). To support these phones the first cellular networks were created using very tall towers to operate. The purpose was to transmit large “cells” that could cover as wide an area as possible so subscribers could connect with the network. But…

  • Optimize and Prophesize 2010 Highlights

    2010 was my fifth year of blogging and my second year on Twitter. My number of blog posts have continued to trend down the past few years, though my posts these days tend to be more thought out and longer – so hopefully the quality has gone up. I looked back on my blog posts…

  • Algorithmic Search and Discovery

    When Rich Skrenta who has been a pioneer in Search with Topix (and just launched Blekko) writes the following, I take notice: “Algorithmic search is sinking. The only way to combat this and return trust and quality to search is by taking an editorial stand and having humans identify the best sites for every category.…

  • Unlocking the True Value of Digital with User Flows

    From 2003-2005 I spent a lot of time observing people of all ages and walks of life use the web across many different sites and verticals. I watched their facial expressions and body language as they surfed. I watched their mouse movements and the locations of their clicks.  I asked them to put their brains…

  • Another Brick in the Paywall

     There have been some interesting thoughts, news and events the past week in regards to paying for content online that made me realize while I hold some strong beliefs and experiences in the area I’ve not written about these ideas in a long while. Over the past couple of years I have helped advise three of the…

  • Optimizing Conversion Rate for the Mobile Web

    Tim Ash was kind enough to invite me to speak at what turned out to be a great launch of Conversion Conference. It was great event and highly recommended. Many years ago we put an agenda together at Offermatica to do a conversion show but it never got off the ground. Finally now there is…

  • Display Advertising’s New Wave

    This week I was supposed to be in Amsterdam giving a presentation at Sanoma Uitegevers MediaParade event. As luck would have it a volcano erupted and forced me to cancel the trip. Below is the presentation I was really excited to give. It’s 45 minute talk, history lesson, state of the union and crystal ball…

  • Bounce Rates & Publisher Monetization from Search

    Bounce rate from natural search is a problem that has plagued publishers for a long time. It’s one of the problems we’re working on solving at Yieldbot. Many pubs spend a great amount of time and effort working on SEO to increase site visitors. The fruit of this labor is increased traffic to pages relevant…

  • Display’s Matching Problem

    Simply put, advertising is a matching problem. It is a puzzle of people and needs, demand and awareness, creativity and messaging, and most of importantly, timing and context. It works best when the shape of the consumer fits perfectly with the shape of the advertiser. While conceptually this idea is not new  - advertisers have…

  • What Social Check-Ins Forgot: The Value of Landing Pages

    I have yet to become a fan or user of social/location based check-in services though I am a fan of the beaconing strategy they employ. As I’ve written before, value creation on the web involves more than a one-to-one exchange of value. A trifecta of goal fulfillment between your product or service, your audience and…