Optimize & Prophesize – @jonathanmendez

  • 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…

  • Test Design Advice for SEOmoz on their Landing Page Competition

    I’m incredibly excited about the SEOmoz landing page competition. Not only did they chose to use the Offermatica platform but because of the awareness, education and information that this test will provide, countless marketers will experience the fun and excitement of testing. What is testing if not a competition? Testing is also an ongoing learning…

  • Monday Morning – Are You Changing the World?

    OTTO Digital CEO Jamie Roche has a great blog post about what inspires great businesses and what is holding back greatness with most companies today. It’s based on a string of recent interviews Jamie conducted with folks who all left the same (major media) company for the same reason. After being pitched the idea that…

  • 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…

  • Afterthoughts on SES Toronto

    If there was one word on the mind of folks I talked to at SES Toronto it would be “analytics.” Interesting since this was the exact same word on the mind of search marketers at SES New York a few months ago. Luckily there were a number of smart folks that really understand analytics to…

  • Engaging Users on the SERP – How Google Universal Search Changes Everything

    If you haven’t noticed over the past few weeks there has been a sea change on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Universal Search is what Google calls it but it’s much more than search. At its core it creates an entirely different engagement dynamic and search user experience. Until now the goal of Google’s…

  • Optimizing Social Media Landing Pages

    Last week on Search Engine Land Neil Patel raised the idea of creating custom landing pages for Social Media. I’m all for it. I’ll try to build on Neil’s ideas and add my thoughts on optimizing this type of landing page. SMO Success Metrics One problem people have with Social Media Optimization (SMO) is not…

  • Year One of Optimize and Prophesize

    “It’s all one song!” – Neil Young This month marks my first year of blogging. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience that I look forward to continuing with forever. Special thanks to Jamie Roche who encouraged me (actually I believe he forced me) to start blogging. Matt Roche for the friendly page views competition…

  • Bud.tv: Anheuser-Busch Cracks a Cold One

    As prophesized here upon launch and reported yesterday and today elsewhere, Bud.tv is officially a failure. The next time your business or agency wants to throw money at a digital marketing initiative it is probably a good idea to do some testing and optimization of your offering first. A lot of egg on the face…

  • Convenience Marketing: The Medium is the Message

    As marketers and advertisers we sometimes forget the most basic reason people use the digital medium. Convenience. The user experience online has no parallel in the offline world. The offline experience is optimized in a whole other manner. If you read Paco Underhill’s wonderful insight into offline shopping strategy in “Call of the Mall” you…

  • 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…

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