Jonathan Mendez's Blog

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 paranoid though, they’ve been sleeping through the transformation of the digital media landscape. Wake up! You can’t operate strategically the same way for 5 years in a row in digital. The technology moves too fast.

While content channels like search, mobile and social continue to rise and technology like APIs, JavaScript, XMP & RDF continue to advance publishers have made little to no investment innovating to provide better experiences with their content or revenue generation for themselves. Instead, they sat there like fat cats measuring all the free search traffic and impressions of countless display ads on their pages – and God forbid they do anything with that data.

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What’s become clear in the morass of low CPM and poor performance is that publishers can no longer rely on third parties to deliver revenue. The plunge has magnified an online ad ecosystem fraught with multiple inefficiencies – creative agencies, media buyers and planers, ad ops, networks, and on and on. Recent innovations like yield optimization and real-time bidding are only anesthetic on a wound bleeding from both sides.

Solving the revenue problem requires publishers to look in the mirror and take matters into their own hands. There have been small moves in this direction with marketing technology/services acquisitions by Cox, Glam and Meredith. Still, too few publishers understand to survive they need self-reliance.

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Ironically or not, the best example of these ideals for publishers springs from the same area as Emerson himself, TechTarget (full disclosure: TechTarget is a previous client while I was at Offermatica).

If you don’t know Tech Target your sys admin does. They operate over 50 websites in the IT space. Here’s a brief description of the company:

TechTarget Inc. is a provider of online content for buyers and sellers of corporate information technology (IT) products. Its product offerings address both lead generation and branding objectives of advertising customers.

That’s right, TechTarget has its own product solutions for advertisers. They are marketers as much as they are publishers, an agency as much as they are authors. They understand the traffic on their site, there to view their content, is theirs and the onus is on them to find the best ways to monetize it.

Really, who better to do it? Who knows more about their audience than they do? It makes perfect sense then to discover and then help meet the goals of their audience. With all the explicit and implicit data about their audience shouldn’t they be able to do this better than anyone else?

Once you have that mindset everything changes. You focus on the goals of your visitors, not the goals of your advertisers. You focus on gaining expertise on page optimization to derive the highest revenue per visitor. You focus on loyalty by knowing who your visitors are and what interests them. Your buyers become partners, not faceless networks and agencies. You do it yourself and you keep all the rewards, never for a moment aligning with revenue streams that don’t properly valuate your visitors and the content you created for them.

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Don’t tell me this will not work outside of B2B. While content may differ the user goals of information recovery and discovery and the ways to optimize and monetize them are agnostic to verticals.

I shed no tears for publishers. I’ve been beating the drum for three years that every page is a landing page. We even had a name for it at Offermatica, Content Merchandising. It never really caught on like we expected but then again it didn’t matter. There were lots of performance-based businesses that needed our services. Not surprisingly there are even more of them now (both optimization tools and performance marketers). Publishers can’t continue to be run into the ground by these savvy marketers exploiting the delta between the value of the publisher’s content & audience and what they are paying for it.

I see no other option. Use your content as the basis for your own advertising and marketing services. Be innovative, control your destiny, own the page, own the next page and deliver relevance, great experiences and utility with every pixel. Most of all help your visitors to make decisions and take actions with your content. Inherent in those actions resides the value of your content.

Related Posts:

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

Mashing Up the Value of Ads & Content

How Semantic Apps Can Deliver Relevance to Implicit, Explicit & Latent Intent

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 to try it again. Two weeks ago, Google followed-up with announced change of URL parameters. Some good and some bad. This week Google again seems to be rolling out AJAX SERPs this time more extensively for Firefox users. Something is happening here.

It has become clear that we are all Google’s Mr. Jones. The Google Mothership seems to be leaving and we can choose to get onboard for the data ride (Google Analytics would likely still be able to capture queries and the like) or we can live in a netherworld of insufficient data. With some sites getting 50% or more of their traffic from Google natural search not using GA in this scenario relegates them to a sort of third world of data and renders their subscription-based analytics platforms limp.

There is no question in my mind that Google owns this referrer data though I have heard it argued otherwise from the analytics vendors. The click action takes place in the Google domain and though the link data is generated from publisher content, publishers are under no obligation to have their sites indexed. There is also no question to its value. Huge. It is worth mentioning that much of the URL shorteners now driving an ever growing amount of web traffic pass even less useful referrer parameters to the linked sites.

This is Google's nuclear option to the world of web data. The fallout will be an analytic winter for many. The face of the analytics, SEO, online publishing, testing, targeting and even the public markets will all change. Does the very fact that Google has so much data leverage mean they are likely to use it to their advantage at some point? Would it be so bad to live in a world of (free) GA? They have made great strides with segmentation and continue to add data visualization. Of course there are plenty of reasons ethical, historical and rational that Google must leave their URL passable and parseable. It appears now less likely than ever to happen.

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 people don’t appreciate.

However, we’ve now reached a point in the development of the web where the inverse has become just as important. Technology’s use with creative will powerfully change the web experience for people by delivering more relevance and more engaging experiences. Creative is becoming part and parcel of the platforms where it resides and applications that deliver and present it.

Right now testing technology sits at the forefront. It’s been amazing to witness the rise of creative testing over the four years I’ve been speaking about it on the conference circuit. From 0-70% of the audience in 4 years and every one of the major testing players acquired by companies like Omniture, Interwoven, Accenture & Acxiom.

As we move towards a real-time intelligent/dynamic web, content targeting and analytics will play a larger role and get rolled up into creative technology. It’s important to understand at its core creative tech is about two things - rules and results.

Data Driven Design

In the past few weeks two high profile events took place that illuminated the role of technology on creative.

Facebook’s redesign: Whatever you want to say about the design it was driven by data (or FB needs to sell NOW). As Scott Rafer mentioned at SES the design really was about revenue metrics as much as it was copying Twitter. It still amazes me how many creative decisions are not about revenue. Which bring us to…

The departure of Google’s Visual Design Lead Doug Bowman: He could no longer work at a company that made most every design decisions based on testing and revenue data rather than an opined aesthetic. There is a great discussion of that conflict here.

What we can learn from Facebook and Google – two of the most technically savvy organizations on the web. Both are at their core about delivering rules based content. Both use data on revenue generation to drive design. They are the blueprint.

Design Power

For all the Silicon Valley geekery and new found fascination with quants on Madison Avenue there is a giant issue playing out. Design power. You see, as soon as your audience has the right answer the rules of creative change. Design becomes a question of how well you know your audience. To paraphrase Steve Jobs design is not about what it looks like, but how it works. This is not an ad agency strong suit.

The agency problem (and one I’ve experienced once over twice) is that literally and figuratively they can’t afford to test. Testing creates too much conflict (fearful Creative Directors) and inefficiency (training, increased costs & multiple creative). I’m aware that some like WPP are talking the talk but change would require ground up realignment of their workforce, business operations and structure. Even if they tried they may simply be too big and too old to succeed at this.

Additionally, the progress of creative technology is in many respects making testing more difficult (but more valuable). As mentioned, moving the needle now is becoming more about targeted content and the dynamic real-time web. Testing informs these rules but this scales at a content delivery/management platform, something Madison Avenue is once again far behind on. In the web's next phase technology needs to be your Chief Strategy Officer and the data collected from your audience needs to be your Creative Director.

Creative Distribution

The irony is that there really isn’t anything more creative than testing. Testing allows creativity to flourish within a company. I call it creative distribution. Getting more creative variation in front of more people to measure results is a good thing – always!

Testing democratizes the creative process. Good ideas can come from anywhere. Testing also allows the ultimate creative license. Radical ideas can have a place right beside the status quo. Often those radical ideas are the ones that get the best results. While other times it may something as simple as the color of a button that matters.

Most importantly testing allows you to learn and get better as a creative. Measurement lets you know how good you really are as a creative. Business is competitive – why shouldn’t creative be as well? Maybe one day we’ll see a league of optimizers where we keep track of their stats on an ROI basis. Maybe even Rotoptimization.

Results

Testing, targeting, data and analytics have continued to pick up speed in the digital world with the explosion of PPC and continued velocity towards a “pay-per” economy. There is no going back. This is exactly what the web’s “services” model should be and it remains the web’s economic destiny -- many would say we’re already there.

Those of us working on developing creative technology are now in a period of tremendous innovation. Our Newport 65 is upon us and we're going electric. As with everything creative there will always be people with rigid ideas of what creative is and whom they look to for creative ideas. There will also be another group of people. People who just get better results. People busy being born, not dying.

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 clients. As I alluded to in the session, no one is more prepared to manage campaigns with multiple segmentations, heavy analytics and performance required better than search advertisers. Our time is now.

Search Becomes the Display OS

View more presentations from jonathanmendez.

Speaking and Clinic at SES New York

Next week Search Engine Strategies rolls into my home turf and I’ll be involved in a couple of ways.

On Tuesday March 24th in the Expo Hall I will running an audience based clinic.

3:00pm Expo Hall: CPA Optimization Station
With advertising dollars more accountable than ever optimizing your Cost Per Acquisition or Cost per Action (CPA) has never been more important. Take advantage of this rare opportunity to sit with Jonathan Mendez as he finds ways to improve your ROI. Jonathan will perform strategic evaluations and provide actionable insights on the consumer touch-points in your conversion path - keywords, ads, landing pages and registration/checkout. Jonathan will also offer test ideas for use with Multivariate & A/B testing and advice on how to use emerging marketing technologies to further improve your results.

On Wednesday March 25th I am very excited to usher in something close to my heart; the first search engine conference session exploring the rise of search-based strategies, technologies, analytics and performance moving at high velocity into the world of display.

2:15pm Advertising Track: Search Becomes the Display OS
Search advertising, the onetime bastard stepchild of internet marketing which only five years ago barely existed, is now poised to double the spend of display advertising in 2009 (eMarketer). With the continued decline in Display performance, some people believe the only thing that will save Display advertising is making it more like Search. This session explores these leading edge ideas, technology and provides some early case studies the effectiveness of making Search the Operating System for Display. We will provide case study examples of the above and the amazing results achieved and ads that are not only search applications themselves but that can be purchased and targeted based on the keyword.

Moderator: Gregg Stewart, Senior Vice President, Interactive, TMP Directional Marketing
Speakers:
Jonathan Mendez, Founder & CEO, RAMP Digital
Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery
Amit Kumar, VP Product , Dapper

Let me know if you’ll be there. I would love to connect at the show with anyone working on interesting things.

Will New OPA Creative Sizes Help Redefine Display?

I’ve been pretty adamant that new creative sizes were needed to help advertisers so when I woke up this morning to see the OPA has announced three new ad sizes I was thrilled. Clearly my excitement has not been matched by a lot a folks who see this as “shouting louder” and in fact if theses sizes are being used to just create bigger billboards that is not going to help anyone.

However, if they are weaved into the distributed web and are more like landing pages than ads these sizes offer phenomenal potential to share content and functionality that will possibly redefine display by bringing back higher CPMs to pubs, huge ROAS to advertisers and great experiences to people.

Here’s a look at the new sizes I put together since I have not seen anyone lay these out yet:

O P A New Creative

View more presentations from jonathanmendez.

I have little interest in the 970x418 pushdown. Any interruptive experience is a bad one for your audience. This should be killed on sight. But the other two formats are incredibly interesting.

Let’s take a look at this from a transactional advertiser perspective. Let’s say Old Navy is the advertiser and we use those sizes to deliver the kids clothing section of their website in an ad for a back to school campaign. The ad has full site functionality up until a product page or an add to cart.

Let’s say the ads run at $30 CPM as a direct buy with top tier publishers. Here’s a numbers crunch.

$100k buy = 3.33M Impressions
Assume 5% of audience engages in the ad= 166,666
Assume 3% of engagers convert to a transaction (industry avg.) = 4,998 conversions
Assume AOV (average order value) is $40 = $199,920

That’s a whopping 99% ROAS!

Of course these are just estimates but I think they are exciting. The key is getting the proper advertiser functionality in the ad so that is a useful utility rather than a billboard. But as far as I’m concerned, been there, done that.

The other nice part about this is working with direct sales teams can offer a greater understanding and ability to provide contextual relevance with the ad content and the publisher content. My semantic tech brothers and sisters should be stoked about this as well.

So, I’m immediately in the market to build these ads and test them in July. My contact information is above if you’re an advertiser or publisher interested in being a part of it.

Search Becomes the Display Operating System

I first wrote about the idea of search strategies working in display to deliver more relevant ads two years ago. In the ensuing two years as followers of this blog know I’ve become passionate about the opportunity to build creative technology that makes display ads more relevant. One advantage I have working on these solutions is that I’m an outsider. I don’t think the way people in the display world think. I’m wired differently. I am and will always be a search guy.

That mindset helps because search is more than a channel. Search is the way people use the web. People don’t just fire up a browser without a goal in mind. We are all taking actions on the web based on our goal. Information we notice and content we experience along our goal path may change our goals, but it does not change the two basic natures of how we use the web – recovery and discovery.

Therein lies the key functional distinction between display and search. Search (as an app on the platform) is weaved into the web and the way we use it. Display is not. Display is layered on top of the web. This is why despite twelve years and countless millions of investment it has never performed. Frankly, it was doomed from the get-go. It never was a web service but rather built to be its own parallel platform (ehem, “Platform A”). The problem inherent with that is the medium is itself a platform. Ads will never control this medium. Here the medium (users) should control the ads.

These ideas formed the basis of RAMP - to shrink dynamic landing pages and serve them to people based on any number of rules - effectively reverse engineering the search experience into display's near limitless inventory and producing higher ROI through lower display CPM than search CPC. One year later we are doing all of this with some amazing technologies supporting these endeavors. We are creating display ads to be off ramps to existing goal paths and on ramps to changed goals. We are using keywords to define the ad that is shown and allowing users to maintain control over the content experience within the ad much the same way one would use a SERP.

That brings me to this:

"The increasing marginal returns of search advertising are now doing more than taking market share from display advertising, they are en route becoming display advertising's operating principle."

I read this from Scott Rafer (Founder of MyBlogLog, Mashery & Lookery) this past October. It encapsulated my own thinking and at the same time made me think the ideas I was working on with RAMP were part of something much larger and something that it was time to talk about.

So when it came time to pitch session ideas to SES New York I contacted them and led off my pitch with Scott’s quote. They immediately agreed to add this session, give it primetime slot on the agenda and kept Scott’s quote in the summary.

I’m psyched that Search Becomes the Display OS will be the first conference session explaining and exploring the many ways search strategies, technology and innovation are making advertising more relevant, creating better experiences for people and delivering increased performance for advertisers and publishers.

So on March 25th at 2:15pm I hope you’ll join me in New York when Scott Rafer, Amit Kumar (former lead of Yahoo Search Monkey now VP Product for Dapper) and Bob Dillon VP of Product Marketing at Yahoo help usher in a new era of technology, functionality, relevance and performance in display.

Previous Posts on Bringing Search to Display:

Intelligent Web: Where Search & Display Advertising Meet

Display Becomes Us

Real Behavioral Targeting Focuses on Intent

Behavioral Targeting is Not Just Banners

Why Is Recovery.gov Making Online Access to ARRA Difficult?

Note: This post has bias to no political party -- other than the optimizers of freedom.

There has to be a reason that the good folks at recovery.gov want to make it difficult to view the full ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) bill.

First, I had to fish around before finding the actual law that the entire site is built for. WTF? Right now what else is of more interest on the site! 

The link is on the homepage placed in small text well below the fold. It is also below the fold on an internal page and the FAQ.  Let’s remember, these folks are not optimization beginners. One has to think with their acumen this placement is intentional.

What’s most amazing however is that once you click the link a PHP call (the site is built on Drupal) brings a shadow box requiring a second click to perform the link request. WTF II?

 

Maybe the data they intend to share with the public will include the drop off rate after that first click (they are running WebTrends SmartSource Data Collector). It would be interesting to see how many people who wanted to read arguably this Nation’s most important legislation in a generation were prevented in doing so by the site design.

This raises one last but important point I’ve been thinking about (mostly because of Google’s dominance as a source of information). As we develop our nation’s technology policy there should be certain standards and conventions around universal digital access to documents, especially public ones. Vint Cerf alluded to this idea from a historical perspective (information decay) at his SMX keynote. My perspective is one of equal and simplified access to our nation's laws right now! This seemed to be a position Obama endorsed as a campaigner which is why this recovery.gov situation is even more surprising.

Let's start by pressing recovery.gov to change this experience and then ensure query enabled search and one-click access across as many browsers and operating systems as possible to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Who’s with me?

Advanced Landing Pages - SMX West

For years, first with javascript testing and content targeting tools and now adding APIs and semantic technology, I have maintained that landing pages are the most advanced forms of digital marketing -- the ultimate marriage of technology with creative.

So it was great to finally get an “advanced” landing pages session on the schedule this year at SMX. I guess advanced landing pages have arrived. I enjoyed seeing the interest in the crowd and also how the other presenters defined what an advanced page is.  Here is my definition.

Advanced Landing Pages

View more presentations from jonathanmendez. (tags: api semantic)

Speaking & Pushing the Envelope at SMX West

I’m going back to Cali. Next week I’ll be in SF/SV with my primary purpose speaking and attending SMX West in Santa Clara. 

Day one I’ll be on the panel Up Close with You Tube. What’s an optimization guy doing on this panel? Well it is not because of my fascination and bullish outlook with all things YouTube. It is not because of my thoughts two years ago that SEMs are best suited to manage ads on what is essentially a video search engine. Nor is it the fact that this post on optimizing youtube tags is the most visited page on my blog due to my #1 ranking in Google for “youtube tags.” It is because I’ll be presenting a case study on how a RAMP client used YouTube as the base platform for a cross-media marketing campaign. Matt Liu, Product Manager for YouTube is also on the panel and I am very interested to hear Google’s thoughts on how to do well with YouTube. 

Day two for me is all about my beloved landing pages. At lunch I’ll be hosting a “meet and eat” table on landing page optimization so if you’re going to the show please come by and I’ll be happy to break some bread while attempting to answer your questions on A/B testing strategy, MVT technology, results confidence, or any other vexing LPO question you might have. 

After lunch I’ll be speaking on Advanced Landing Page Strategies. I’m excited about this session dedicated to looking beyond the idea of the landing page as a static experience that overlays A/B & MVT testing and looks at the landing page experience through the window and impact of real-time web technologies that create dynamic experiences. This is a profound change. I’ll be providing an overview of the technologies (APIs, javascript, semantic) and strategies (segmentation, targeting) that can be used to create these more relevant experiences. 

Looking forward to some warmer weather too. Let me know if you’re going to be there and want to meet up.