Jonathan Mendez's Blog

RAMP is Born to Run

Two and a half weeks. That’s all it’s been since I left to start my own company for the third time in the past decade. In that brief period I’ve signed four clients including leaders in Social Media, B2B Services, Politics and Auto. Every day is filled with talking to prospects, potential investors, potential employees, current and potential partners. Buried in all of this are the more practical and often more fun parts of a start-up that include finding a name, creating an identity, building a website and ultimately establishing a culture. Oh, and there’s real work to do on top of all this! The momentum has my head spinning. So, without further ado I’m thrilled to present my new company to the world.

RAMP Digital

RAMP stands for Relevance Amplified but it means much more. The name combines my love for improving results, launching new ideas and the one thing I know is true about digital marketing -- the more you amplify relevance to people in their digital experiences, the happier they will be and the more successful you will be.

What is RAMP?

RAMP’s foundation is made from the tried and true digital marketing methodologies I’ve developed over the past decade and three basic principles that I believe will define success for digital marketing in the coming decade.

Intent & Affinity are the Root of RAMP’s Segmentation Strategies

I believe that understanding intention is the key to direct marketing success and discovering affinity is the key to brand marketing success. I hate to stovepipe these practices because there is cross-over in each but this basic understanding helps deliver relevance both contextually and directly. Most importantly, understanding consumer intent and affinity allows for the development of segmentation strategies to target creative and messaging. This segmentation provides a core foundation of intelligence to optimize the presentation and delivery of marketing and advertising.

Achieving Success with Advanced Marketing Technologies is RAMP’s Core Value to Clients

In my last post I briefly mentioned the new wave of emergent technologies that are coming upon marketers fueled by the investment boom of the past two years. They will create new ways of advertising, new tools for optimization and a higher degrees of intelligence and analytics than ever before. The problem is most agencies don’t have a clue how to be successful with them. RAMP will be the go-to agency for what we believe will be the best-in-breed of these technologies. We are partnering with emerging players in Social Media, Display & Semantic Web to serve as a conduit between their mind-blowing technology and real world client results. In the process we’ll build a few really cool applications of our own that I hope people and businesses will want to be a part of.

RAMP will also work with marketers using Omniture Offermatica. Having already built a services company around the technology and having used the technology across more clients and with greater success than anyone over the past three years, I anticipate this will be the biggest part of RAMP’s business for the foreseeable future. Certainly the services market around optimization technology is going to explode.

Testing, Targeting & Optimization is RAMP’s DNA

For most agencies and marketers these practices are add-ons. For RAMP, A/B and Multivariate testing, targeted content and profile creations are embedded as part of everything we do. Every RAMP landing page, microsite, widget or application comes with a test plan, optimization roadmap and targeting plan. The technology to measure and optimize results are an embedded as part of the deliverable. We know digital marketing success is based on iterative strategy and the velocity of intelligence collection -- both of which lead to consistent performance improvement. We will always be testing, targeting and optimizing and our clients will have the results to show for it.

So we’re blasting off. These are incredibly exciting times for our industry and I’m privileged to have the opportunity of a lifetime to help shape what’s possible. As always I look forward to sharing success stories (and failures) with you here to help further the dialog around digital marketing optimization. I will keep speaking about optimization, delivering case studies and developing the next generation of marketing solutions to keep pace with the needs of the most aggressive marketers.

Rave on, turn those amplifiers up to 11 and make your performance spreadsheet look like a ramp.

Behavioral Targeting Standards - RIP BT 1.0

At last Monday’s OMMA Behavioral event sponsor Revenue Science launched the day by declaring the need for industry self preservation, err, regulation with the establishment of the Revenue Science Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium. Actually, it’s officially just called the Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium though there is no consortium yet and the group’s domain is owned by Revenue Science.

What is this? Simply, it is the creation of segment standardization for media buyers. This is not the first time BT standards have been tried. Tacoda played this hand way back in 2004. The idea behind behavioral standardization or more specifically standardized segments is that if BT was just easier for advertisers and agencies to understand more money would roll into BT. In other words it’s not the performance, inventory or CPMs that are holding back critical mass for Behavioral Targeting, it’s the fact that marketers are just not smart enough to “get it.”

These ideas are wrong, self-serving and incredibly short sighted. I know because I’ve been creating segmented marketing campaigns for the past decade. Success is predicated on understanding the unique objectives of the campaign and finding the audience where those objectives are most relevant. This requires customization in the segmentation and creative strategies as well as constant measurement, testing and optimization. This doesn’t even take into account affinity discovery and results, both of which can be incredibly counterintuitive.

For further proof that standardization is the wrong path one only needs to look at the next-wave of emergent technologies in targeting. Highly customizable factors are at their core.

• Semantically aware networks
• Intention based networks
• Rules based content delivery platforms
• Intelligence aggregators
• Tools for mass customizable creative
• Google gadgets

What is clear is that new solutions offer better results to advertisers, publishers and deliver more relevance in more parts of the web to more consumers.

This is not lost on the likes of Revenue Science. Their model of capturing behavior and targeting consumers was special in 2004 but seems antiquated today. While their relationships with agencies and publishers run deep there is just too much forward progress in this area among a host of companies that have Series A or B and an insane focus on improving this space. In the end it will not be about the promise of a technology, relationships or how you define “behavioral,” it will be about performance.

So what better time to declare the death of Behavioral Targeting 1.0 and usher in a new era for BT where segments are easy to create, easier to buy and well worth the cost. The irony is that this will not take place with standardization but with customization. Long live targeting!

Speaking at OMMA Behavioral

Monday I’ll be moderating a panel at OMMA Behavioral in New York City. It’s an important day for those of us that work in onsite optimization since this is the first time we’ve been represented with our own session at OMMA Behavioral. It will not be the last. This session has a stellar group and I hope to lead a very interesting dialog. Please say hello if you are there.

1:30pm: Publisher-- Merchandise Thyself
While many publishers have attached their inventory to behavioral ad networks, too few are making the best use of the data they already have on their own users. How can content providers leverage their own usage metrics to merchandise themselves better, with audiences and with advertisers? How can recommendation engines, personalization and better routes to content discovery optimize the audiences sites already have?

Moderator: Jonathan Mendez, Former Founder & CSO, OTTO Digital

Panelists:
Scott Brave, CTO/co-founder, Baynote
Robert Tas, CEO, Active Athlete
Joe Baker, Care2org
Kirsten Rasanen, Director Video Develop, TVGuide.com
Andy Monfried, CEO Lotame

Yes, Email is Your Social Graph

I know this has been written before but in the past few days it hit home for me as I’ve contacted my network to update them with professional information. Email is your social graph.

In less than 2 years I’ve collected over 800 emails. This is just the list of people I’ve emailed not people that have emailed me. Everyone I’ve communicated with over the past 22 months -- that's 36 people a month or one new contact a day! I’m awed by the enormity. I thought of not mass emailing EVERYONE, and in fact I did selectively leave off folks for various reasons but in this situation the rules of mass-email applies. ROI = Reach.

Somewhere in here is a social app waiting to be born.

Also of note -- Gmail has a limit of 500 sends a day. If you break that limit (as I did) you get penalized. In my case it was 24 hours of being able to send anything. I can’t tell you how frustrating that was.

Thanks to everyone for their well wishes on the new venture. Somehow I’ve forgotten with this being my third start-up in the past decade how much work it is. I also forgot how exciting it is and how that more than makes up for hard work.

Moving On from OTTO/Offermatica/Omniture

In March of 2006 when I met with Matt and Jamie Roche, CEO & President of Offermatica, we agreed that the market was not ready for OTTO Digital. That didn’t stop us - it inspired us. We had an opportunity to create something groundbreaking and we were confident the market would catch-up to us. How right we were. The result has been the most enjoyable ride of my career.

The early days were spent doing work in exchange for case studies. This thing was new -- no one had tried to start a business that married the strategic, creative and technical services around optimization. We had to prove the model. Then in the Fall of 2006 we signed T-Mobile and H&R Block and OTTO Digital got its wings. In the year and a half since, this little thing of ours took off like a rocket.

I leave OTTO having worked with over 40 Clients and a record of success that no agency can touch -- 100% of our clients have experienced measurable performance increases in their digital marketing from our services. We’ve worked with the leaders in almost every vertical. Companies like Disney, Microsoft, IBM, Sears, Intuit and many others. Save one, not a single client has stopped optimizing with the Offermatica tool. T-Mobile and H&R Block remain two of our best clients. I’m proud to have the titles of Founder & Chief Strategy Offer, OTTO Digital forever associated with my career.

What I’m most proud of is the team we built at OTTO. There are not many people that know how to do what we do. The group, many of whom I brought in personally, are world-class marketers and technologists. They share a love of testing and the courage to measure their ideas in real-time in front of a live audience. Their place in and their impact on the future of marketing is secure.

As for me, I will continue to follow my vision and passion and be on the front-lines in the strategic battle to provide relevance to people in their online interactions. If you’ve been following this blog you have an idea where I see this future. The tools and technologies to deliver relevance have progressed much faster than the ability for businesses, advertisers and agencies to leverage them effectively. This presents a great opportunity to create a new kind of business - one that provides next-generation optimization services and delivers marketing solutions. I look forward to sharing more details with you soon.