Optimize & Prophesize – @jonathanmendez

  • Digital Spaces That Excite Me for 2010

    Last year I was very fortunate to meet some incredible people involved in shaping the future of digital media. I enjoyed learning about what interests them, hearing their points of view and discovering what problems they were working on solving. Needless to say, digital media evolves at an astounding velocity so I thought this was…

  • 2009 Recap: My Faves, Posts & Presos

    "A friend is one before whom I may think aloud." – Emerson 2009 was an amazing year of discovery for me and I tried to share as much of that here as I could. This year also presented a sea change in my writing because I started using a new communications platform, Twitter (you can…

  • Waiting to Rule the Ad World: The Next Decade Will Shift to Search

    With apologies to BTO, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Over the next decade we’ll see Search explode unlike any media we have ever seen before. Dollar for dollar, in one form or another, sometime before the end of the coming decade, Search will become the most important and valuable media channel in the world. Search…

  • Rising Tide of PPC Means SEO is Sinking

    With all current fuss about automated content for SEO I've found the recent changes by Google here and here have only greatly diminished the value of SEO for the most valuable keywords (those that have transactional value). Case in point is this SERP for "rifle scopes." This was a query used during my Ad Copy & Continuity…

  • SES Chicago Next Week

      Next week I’ll be speaking for my 5th year at SES Chicago. I feel privileged that the good folks putting on the show now and in the past have been gracious enough to keep inviting me back. The sessions I’ve spoken on through the years: 2005: Searcher Behavior Research 2006: Ads in a Quality Score World          Ad…

  • Read All About It: Online News Has No Clue About Optimization

    I’ve been reluctant to write more about publishers issues with monetization having recently written pieces here, here, here and here but the recent spotlight cast by Rupurt Murdoch on Google’s traffic and sympathetic follow up pieces by respected writers like Tom Foremski and Michael Arrington have now boiled me over. Having spent the better part of a…

  • Optimizing Display Ad Creative for CTR & Conversion

    Most display advertising is still purchased on a CPM basis – you are buying a certain number of impressions. For that reason the higher percentage of clicks you get on your ad impressions the more cost effective your buying becomes. So ad creative is often the lynchpin to ROI. But it is very hard to…

  • Interviewed by AdExchanger

    If you are at all involved in display advertising AdExchanger.com is a daily must read. So I was really psyched when they wanted to interview me and that interview was published today. It covers what we are doing at RAMP Digital and my POV on the state and future of the digital ad industry.  …

  • People & Performance NOT Pages & Prices

    The following post was originally published as a guest post for the AdMonsters blog in advance of my speaking at their Leadership Forum. For more reading on the ideas contained here I also recommend this post and this post on Chris Dixon's blog. Fragmentation = Problems & Opportunities No one will argue that the Display marketplace is an…

  • Reaping The Ads You Sow

    Trends in search provide amazing intelligence. So much so that Google has provided a destination site with information even non-data junkies will find interesting. You can look at this data and understand two things about online marketing. TV drives a great deal of search inventory/demand/price/scale Getting media channels to work together can reap huge rewards Different…

  • Pubs Need to Get the Performance $ignal

      There is growing debate about the future of journalism and to a greater extent publishing in the digital age. The axis of the conversation is revenue generation or lack thereof. The problem in this space is one that frustrates me enormously because the answers are there. We know how to make money on the…

  • Recap: Search Becomes the Display Operating System

    "So yeah I sampled your voice, you was using it wrong/ You made it a hot line, I made it a hot song" – Jay Z, Takeover It was with the swagger that comes from presenting at my 5th SES in San Jose that I created a new presentation below for the session I put…

  • Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.

    For the past 15 years web analytics has been namely about one thing, counting. Counting is very important and as an industry we have become infatuated with it. Never before could a medium really count what was happening with it. Attributable media was and continues to be truly revolutionary. Attribution quickly formed the business models…

  • The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising

      Display advertising is at a crossroads. Its core foundation, the publisher, is crumbling. The latest technology advances are little more than band-aids that invite scrutiny. The channel that once seemed destined to define digital is latching onto as many operating principles from Search as it can. It might be time to make a deal with…

  • Audience: Display Advertising’s Cat in the Hat?

    Display advertising, which at one time looked like the web’s glorious channel is now a glory hole for direct marketing. In many respects brand advertisers have themselves to blame, not believing that a click is branding and fumbling around with poor microsite driven strategies that have zero ROI. The fact of the matter is an…

  • API Battle Plans: Fighting for Next

    We have reached maturation point with APIs where the three core components of the web experience – content, utility & data – are becoming readily available via API delivery. The implication of this growth is nothing less than the next web. A smarter web that delivers improved relevance, a better experience and expanded revenue generation…

  • Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing

    This is getting tired. Recent comments by Jim Spanfeller and remarks at yesterday’s hearing on The Future of Journalism are just the latest show of disregard for the major changes that have taken place in the digital medium over the past five years. As Grove said about technology, only the paranoid survive. Publishers haven’t been…

  • Google Stripping Referring URL Parameters Will Leave Many Naked

    Back in early February Google did a little test. It decided to test an AJAX SERP. This meant Google sent natural search result traffic to sites without any passing identifying parameters except the top-level domain google.com. Message Boards and Blogs lit up immediately. They stopped the test (to 10% of traffic) quickly but in March seemed…

  • Busy Being Born: Creative Technology & Analytics

    Twice in the past week I have had conversations about the creative use of technology. My point was that technology by itself has all the elements necessary for creativity to flourish. Coding is creative. The web has progressed to date only because of those who thought about technology from a creative perspective. It’s something many…

  • SES Presentation: Search Becomes the Display OS

    75% of the audience was agencies and amazingly 80% of those people were running both Search and Display campaigns. As my fellow presenter Scott Rafer has noted on more than one occasion the falling cost of Display can bring back better returns than search. Believe it! I saw it myself three times this week for…

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