Optimize & Prophesize

Category: User Experience

  • Misguided Notions: A Study of Value Creation in Real-Time Search

    This past week has seen a ton of hype that real-time search is different. That the content creation and behaviors expressed and implied are fundamentally new and exclusive to places like Twitter and mining this data has incredible potential. Having spent a decade in search and the last four years working with dynamic content, APIs and…

  • @jonathanmendez now live on Twitter

    It took a year of observation but I’ve decided that even though I could continue working with and evangelizing APIs & real-time web and not be on Twitter, it was starting to feel weird. I mean c'mon, how would you feel buying a Mercedes then finding out the owner of the dealership drives a Pontiac?…

  • 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…

  • New York Times Landing Pages: All the Irrelevance That Fits the Pixels

    I’ve often used my hometown paper, The New York Times, to exemplify the disconnect between digital publisher content strategy, the goals of visitors and the resultant impact on advertising. The root of this disconnect is the way search, social media and the landing experience fracture content hierarchies. Behavior has changed and so too must the…

  • Optimize Randomness to Deliver Relevance

    The web is never ending path of recovery and discovery. This is what we’re optimizing! Yet we are wired for randomness. Radio, mix tapes, DJ’s, Pandora. Music proves our love of randomness. The sense of discovery fulfills a basic human need. We achieve further fulfillment from enlightening others to our discoveries. The question then becomes…how…

  • Favorite Thing: Posts & Presos of 2008

    "I think think, I think think, I think think, once in a while" -Paul Westerberg If you missed my blog this year or just want a quick summary of my favorite posts and presentations see below  - in full fledged chronological order! Presentations: On-Site Targeting: Crawl, Walk, Run Strategy AdMonsters Keynote: Can Display Advertising Survive the Web?…

  • Social & Ad Opportunities in Semantic Technology

    On the heels of my mini debate with Charlene Li over on her great blog about the role of targeting based on personal behavior rules vs. content rules (or the battle for the future of advertising 🙂 this morning the venerable Stephen Arnold’s also great blog alerted me to an interview on Yahoo! Search Blog…

  • 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…

  • 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).…

  • 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…

  • 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)…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Metallica Optimizes B(r)and for Digital

    There are great content distribution lessons to be learned by watching the digital music space. Likewise, these content creators can also teach us quite a bit about brand building. A short piece in Brand Republic about Metallica’s new album caught my attention. I was especially interested in the excerpt below. It touches on optimizing the…

  • 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.…

  • 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…