Jonathan Mendez's Blog

What Social Check-Ins Forgot: The Value of Landing Pages

I have yet to become a fan or user of social/location based check-in services though I am a fan of the beaconing strategy they employ. As I’ve written before, value creation on the web involves more than a one-to-one exchange of value. A trifecta of goal fulfillment between your product or service, your audience and a third party (advertiser, restaurant, etc.) is required to create value. This is where these services fall short for me and thanks to recent tweets from my friend and SEO guru Natasha Robinson I’ve finally realized why.

As Natasha says, the check-in links syndicated through social media verge on unclickable. The reason is rather simple. The landing pages provide no value to the referrer. Yet, the landing page is the spot where the triangulation of goals must align. The whole value chain for this product converges at the landing page.

While we can clearly see the potential of these services to provide tangible value to the establishment where check-ins occur and some (for now less tangible) value to the Mayor McCheeses and people doing the check-in, I would argue that the service only works if there is strong value being created in the stream. Without this newfangled linkbait, the fish ain’t gonna bite.

Let’s take a look at each of the content areas on Foursquare’s landing page and see what is and isn’t working for a referrer and the value triumvirate as a whole.

  

1) As a referrer I already know from my stream the name of the establishment. I already know that the person that has checked in here. There is huge immediately actionable value for the establishment though. Many locations would benefit from an announcement categorizing everyone who entered it. Of course that can provide parallel value to the person checking in.

2) The amount of check-ins and visitors does not really tell me much, especially for a new service that is building scale -- it’s very difficult for a naïve user to asses this value. Again, most of this value rests for the establishment.

3) The images of the Mayorship and the people who’ve been here have negligible transactional value to anyone.

4) Maybe most interesting for a location based service the map has very little value. In most cases the address above is sufficient information for a referrer at the moment of landing. The establishment and check-in already know where they are.

5) Tips can be helpful but their value is tied to a small segment of temporal traffic (the moment or prior to check-in). While this value is highly dynamic tips have the most shared value among troika of user, establishment and audience.

6) Tags are fairly generic. They likely provide the most value to Foursquare to provide classifications however it doesn’t appear that many users are adding tags. Also it appears there are some negative aspects to user tagging that can affect the value chain.

So the question remains, and of course has become heightened with Yelp adding a location based feature to its service last week and others soon to enter the fray, what improvements can Foursquare and other services make to encourage CTR on their linkbait and then create value from all from those visitors. That’s a rather big question so I’ll just tackle it form the referrer perspective.

As a landing page the primary success metric needs to be converting visitors to register for the service. As the product grows there are many more success metrics that can add value for optimization (e.g. new visitors to location pages that eventually check-in). For existing users there are also important metrics to optimize on against bounce rate/use. What good is a notification service if those notified don't take action?

As mentioned in the dissection above there is nothing on this page that is persuasive and inexplicably there is not a call to action. Is this a game? Then tell me what makes it fun or challenging. Is this a place to make plans? Then what are the tools that make that helpful and easy. Why do I want to use this service? What are the benefits to me? Until the answers to those questions are obvious landing on this page has no value for a referrer and products like this are missing a golden opportunity that may be as temporal as the very content they distribute.

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 follow me here). Many ideas that in the past would have become full-blown posts got tweeted into the stream (or is it an abyss). As a result my pieces tended to be more thought out, longer and less frequent. Also, my subject matter took a distinct turn. Last year I mainly blogged about challenges facing advertising while this year my focus was on the challenges facing publishers. So in case you missed something the first time or want a refresher I have curated a years worth of posts and shared my favorites below.

The Publisher's "Penta-tech":

Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing

Reaping The Ads You Sow

People & Performance NOT Pages & Prices

Pubs Need to Get the Performance $ignal

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

Other Stuff:

API Battle Plans: Fighting for Next

Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.

A Study of Value Creation in Real-Time Search

The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising

Audience: Display Advertising’s Cat in the Hat?

Presentations:

Advanced Landing Pages - SMX West

Interviews:

Interviewed by Aaron Wall at SEO Book

Interviewed by AdExchanger

Lastly, happy and healthy holidays to all my readers, commenters and subscribers both old an new. I truly appreciate and value your interest in what I have to say. See you in 2010.

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 makes up about 15% of the total US advertising spend. Globally it’s even less.  And while the advertising industry continues to shrink (another 15% YoY in H1 2009) the Internet has not been affected. When and if dollars come back it’s hard to imagine this is not where they go.

The efficiency of Search is what will continue to drive dollars into it. No one knows the timing of our needs more than us. Search is the utility of the web, the way we use it – even within applications like email or sites like YouTube. It continues to get more personalized, more intelligent and more relevant.

In a medium where user experience is EVERYTHING, it is our control OVER the medium that provides the best user experience possible. This feedback loop also provides the richest data. Think for a second how smart these relevancy algorithms have been even in the early incarnations of search advertising that we are experiencing now. 

It doesn’t hurt Search’s growth that Google is becoming the Internet. But this is an effect, not a cause of the growth - and there is no end in sight. Local advertising dollars have not even touched search. Direct mail (already data driven) is expected to decline 39% in the next five years - from $49.7 billion in annual spend in 2008 to $29.8 billion and will shift to search. Radio dollars (half local, half national) have not even moved into Search en masse. Then there are the remaining dollars from Newspapers. Looked at a circular lately? Mobile search also has billions more in untapped potential. All these dollars hit search in the coming decade.

Social Media will not eclipse Search as a medium. While important to us for communications it is less important to helping solve problems where the solution has material value. There is no doubt Social Media will continue to become a larger part of our lives as more of our communications take place on the web. Still, it is hard to argue SM will get bigger than the other major communication channel of the web and the other largest consumer of Internet users time, Email. *

Also, as is becoming clearer to the masses, Social Media involves user programming. This requirement is a personal investment people have never made with media before. What is the trade-off? How can we expect to maintain privacy on a web that asks unsophisticated users to manage settings, feeds, alerts and multitudes of preferences all of which are designed to push advertising on them that they don’t want and didn't ask for? And so the analogy with Email continues...

I’m sure there will be plenty of very smart people that will disagree with me and I’m sure I’ve ticked off a few of my friends and favorite people in our business. They all have vital interests in media channels outside of search, as do I. I take nothing away from these channels. We are all viable media that will grow and get better for people & advertisers.

Yet, for some reason I’ve never understood, ever since the rise of Search to critical mass people have been waiting to kill it. Google killers and countless thought pieces on what channel will replace it or take its market share. What’s less realized is that Search has enabled a fundamental shift. This kind of market timing has never been possible to advertisers before. More important, in the ever time-fractured, 24/7 connected, media onslaught world we live in, this kind of pull only gets MORE valuable. Couple with this more and more digital objects getting thrown into the vast sea called the web and Search will undoubtedly continue to be our primary mode of web navigation.

Search a decade from now will be very different than today. One thing that will also be different will be its place in the Media world. As all Media becomes Digital Media, Search will become the world’s dominant advertising medium. But the biggest winner will be you. Happy New Decade!

* Interestingly email and display are roughly about the same market size, $15 billionish. Seems to me that Social Media fits well into that size too. Still I predict by 2015 Search will be bigger than Display, Email & Social Media combined.

** No one will beat Google for combating spam.

Very similar thoughts from last year's "year-end" piece: 

2008: The Year Search Won by a Knockout

 

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 Clinic session at SES Chicago last week. Below I've captured a screen shot in 1024 x 768 clearly showing that not a single natural result is visible above the fold. In fact with the product view a natural listing is not visible until 1440 x 900 and even then it is only a single one.

As you can see on any query, enabling search modes condenses the center well results about 100 pixels. This in-turn produces roll-over for the product details. However, even a single line of product details causes the natural results to sink.

I got out of SEO and into SEM six years ago. November 16th, 2003 to be exact. That was the day of Google's Florida update. That day it became clear that SEO is not a sustainable web business model* -- there are no Google free-rides. But PPC certainly could be. In fact, for digital businesses it HAD to be. This has never been more true.

* The possible exception are the top domainers.

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 get clicks. Display ads have to be more compelling then the content they’ve come to view.

If you are successful taking a viewer and turning them into a clicker the landing page should then message to the visitors expressed interest in the ad creative. This creates a flow. The two moments of recognition (the ad & landing) have incredible influence over conversion. There are no better, more important or more valuable three seconds in marketing. But it all starts with the ad.

1) Getting Noticed: Display’s standardization and placement conventions are exactly what have made CTR drop through the years. Users have literally been programmed to ignore the ad. The fact that even to this day most landing pages suck and redirects provided horrible UX hasn’t helped get more people clicking. If Search has to overcome the Golden Triangle of user eye-tracking, Display has to overcome the Golden Shower.

There are basically four strategies to getting noticed. In order of my preference based on performance:

• Blending: The idea here is to make the ads look like content. This is done not to deceive but due the fact that as mentioned people have built a scanning awareness to block out display conventions. In the early days of Search the fact that the ads looked like the results was a key factor in their performance (while that still exists today to some regard the increased relevance of the ads override that now). We’ve seen this practice work in print for years and it currently works online with flogs. This is just proof of concept. I’m not advocating spoofing but your ads stand a better chance of being noticed and your messages read if they look like content and not ads.

• Motion: My rule (that I stole a few years ago from RIA guru Bill Scott) for all rich media including banners is to only use it if it solves a content delivery problem thus creating a better user experience. Rich media for the sake of rich media is a huge waste of budget. I have no understanding for why Flash is used so often.  Animated GIFs can sometimes be useful in getting your ad noticed but use it in a way that doesn’t detract from the messaging or the looping breaks the content into messaging that is difficult to make sense of.

• Color: Keep in mind the majority of sites your ad will run on have white backgrounds. Again, as mentioned, using bold colors can people to ignore you as much as it can get people to notice you. But big blocks of black and red can attract attention. As in print advertising, reverse coloring (black background with white text) usually does worse in comparison to standard dark on light in most tests.

• Images: Images can really help and really hurt so it’s important to be very careful. Our brains process images much more quickly then text, though often the meaning behind an image is not as clear to us as copy. We all have a natural tendency to look at images of faces especially when they are looking at you. Images of the actual product are often helpful. We also all know that Celebrity Endorsers can be very helpful and it doesn’t necessarily have to be illegal. 

2) Content Hierarchy: Scanning habits make it important to keep your content in a format and font that is easily scanned. This means have clear headlines, supporting bullet points and calls to action. I often find that “brand” creative types think these practices will not work but again but it’s clear from print that this can be massaged in a way that doesn’t have to make headline >> copy >> call to action uniquely direct response.

3) Messaging: Foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds but it is a key component in creating flow and converting clicks. For this reason it’s important that the ads mirror the landing page in messaging and look and feel. Recognition and reinforcement are very important strategies for all facets of conversion optimization for the simple reason they breed confidence. One of the interesting things I’ve witnessed over the years is the role confidence plays in conversion. This might be best exemplified again by flogs or farticles that prey upon localization, brand borrowing and newspaper style layouts to create confidence. Again, I’m not advocating that your creative been made to fool users however it’s clear that the strategies employed here can be leveraged in more elegant and proper ways to improve results.

Many people don’t understand the impact ads have on conversion. In many tests, including multivariate tests across elements of both the ads and landing pages, the ad elements have the highest factor of influence on conversion. It is after all the first impression. Make a good one.

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.  

Read Jonathan's interview on AdExchanger.com

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 incredibly fragmented and inefficient system. Try as they might this advertiser driven ecosystem has created a few problems long hidden by overinflated CPMs. First are the serious issues in the market’s ability to scale. Second, is the arbitrage and optimization often occurring in conflict and silos. Third and worst of all, the ads suck.

In contrast to Display, Search over a shorter period and having grown-up as a publisher side solution has 2 million active advertisers - all participating in a realtime auction based systems based on a single criterion, ad performance. The contrast is startling as are the results – Search spend will double that of display this year.

Enter the Network Paradigm

Just like Wall Street, Madison Avenue also has that New York City reality – if you’re losing money then someone else is making money. Once spend hits the street it is a zero sum game. Into this fragmented world of media buyers, planners, ad serving and publishers came the ad networks - ostensibly filling a huge need for publishers. Yet it now seems ad networks are the collateralized mortgages of the online world. Just the other day Tim Armstrong declared the AOL want to be the digital equivalent of Goldman Sachs, so the analogy has some credence.

This has allowed two things to happen. On the sell side as inventory increases and prices drop, the media ROI for performance marketers continues to increase. So too does their spending. 57% of display advertising was performance last year (IAB/PWC). This year the number will increase for fifth consecutive year at the expense of branded CPM. First half 2009 online display ad spending continues shifting to pay for performance with greater velocity: (TNS +6.5% (CPM +CPC/CPA); Nielsen -1% (CPM only).

On the buy side what’s happening is that while Premium CPMs keep dropping those rising performance spends are being kept at huge margins by networks. For every remnant media dollar roughly a quarter of that is kept by the agencies, a quarter goes to the pubs and half or more of it goes to networks. It’s a damn fine business. No wonder VC’s have funded it up the wazoo to the tune of 2 billion over the past few years.The problem is all of this is cannibalizing the channel. Better tools have produced lower yield for publishers and higher ROI for performance advertisers.

Consequences of Alternate Realities

If there is too much weight on one side it sinks the ship. Publishers can’t survive with this inequity much longer. They own the audience and the content. The value is being created in their environment. They deserve more.

The media reality is that publishers are getting $7k in revenue from inventory being monetized at $48k (I know, I’ve run these RON performance campaigns). The content reality is that in digital power shifts away from the content and towards the distribution of it. The same way Search has done this with content so too have the ad networks done it on the ad side. It’s time for pubs to take the power back.

It’s beginning to happen. A number of publishers are turning into marketing agencies themselves. Meredith has just hired Martin Riedy CEO of Publicis Modem to lead its 400 employee integrated marketing unit. Publishers are now building microsites and custom ads for advertisers in order to get their spend. Are we that far away from NYTimes going to Ford and delivering 500,000 leads over a year for $25M? I don’t think so. Disintermediation anyone?

The Final Frontier

But this change doesn’t happen in display unless there is a fundamental shift in the mindset and technology. Like search, visitor and advertiser value can only be delivered and game-changing revenues can only be achieved for publishers if we start optimizing for people and performance, not pages and prices.

For example, we know from Search that content consumption and temporal trends provide amazing intelligence to deliver relevance. Most large publishers are privy to these interest trends but they do not have the data capture systems to quantify it or the targeting systems to leverage it or the advertising systems to monetize it.

Just like Search the forces that drive monetization are everything from personal needs to macroeconomic or geographic issues. By studying content consumption patterns publishers can understand even earlier than Search the opportunities to match the information and services needs of their audience. Intent is not generated in Search. Intent is generated in publishers content and then moved to Search by the user.

These huge changes require new platforms and tools. For publishers the revenue generation tools available to them have not kept pace with the investment and innovation on the ad side.  The irony is that while agencies are not staffed to leverage most of the more analytic and technical tools publishers sit on a goldmine of optimization mindshare in with their ad ops teams. If it’s ever going to happen, now is the time. Nothing less than the future of the Display market is at stake.

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.

1. TV drives a great deal of search inventory/demand/price/scale
2. Getting media channels to work together can reap huge rewards

Different media channels serve different purposes for marketers and as Search has known for years demand generated by TV, Print, Radio, comes online and ends up as people searching for more information from publishers.

Most of the forces that drive intent occur offline. These vary from personal needs to macroeconomic and/or geographic issues. By studying content consumption patterns the way Google studies queries publishers can understand (even earlier than Google in many cases) what opportunities exist to match the information goals of their visitors with helpful and useful offers.

That’s all that Google is doing, helping people complete their goals. Being relevant to the needs of their visitors in a way that adds value to their experience, the marketer and their own bottom line. Their challenge is looking at the web in its entirety. For pubs the challenge becomes much easier looking within a single domain - especially a vertical one.

If we’ve learned anything 15 years in and with only 7% of brand spend it’s that Digital is not a medium you can use to get people to pay more for a product or service than a lower cost alternative - the essence of brand marketing. Digital actually facilitates the opposite. So where do all those publishers go that have been waiting with bated breath for brand demand to drive their CPMs higher and higher? There is only one option. Get in the demand capture game.

While publishers are privy to the same interest trends as Google they do not have the data systems to capture it, the targeting systems to leverage it or the advertising systems to monetize it (many pubs do have their own internal search applications capturing this data but they do jack shit with it). Also it’s not just the historical data that they can leverage -- as big an opportunity might be in real-time data.

It's time to move away from old media strategies like forecasting, allocation and planning. They never fit on a web where attention unpredictably ebbs & flows across it. The very idea of a campaign is antiquated when there is demand to be captured 365/24. How many more times will publishers fail to leverage events like Michael Jackson’s death or getting 9M impressions over 2 hours after a link is posted? How many more pubs will I speak with that have no idea how much traffic they get from Search each month, let alone daily by vertical.

If there is a wrinkle in the simplicity of the strategy (though I acknowledge the execution is fraught with challenges to norms) it is the number (25%) of search queries that are new everyday – never before seen. This "intention market" dynamic only serves to exemplify further of the nature and importance of the  real-time web.

There’s no “death by Google” going on here as many publishers would like to claim. Furthermore, this is not all about “bottom of the funnel” as many marketers would have you believe. All through the funnel there is plenty of valuable intent. However, if publishers don’t invest in harvesters and reap what they are sowing with their content they will simply starve themselves to death. 

It’s taken well over a decade for these ideas to get any traction at all and there are still plenty of holdouts, especially those who feel their business is publishing, not marketing. But the inevitable fact is online is not a branding/awareness/demand gen tool. It never was. Online is a demand capture tool – and serendipitously the greatest medium ever created for it. Let’s rejoice in that fact and get to work. Fall is the time to harvest.

 

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 web but old mindsets continue to impede progress and have consistently over the past decade allowed upstarts to control both the delivery and revenue generation associated with digital publishing of news and information.

One core issue I continue to witness is the fundamental misalignment between the advertising publishers want and the advertising that works in a news and information medium, be it digital or analog. To this end the OPA (Online Publishers Association) and the IAB have been vehement that it is lack of creativity preventing brand money bags from flowing into the space. I couldn’t disagree more.

The fact of the matter is that when prime-time television CPM is $12, your audience is 12 million and your ad runs for 30 seconds this offers more ad value (and will continue to) for demand gen than online. Also, despite grasping at straws for excuses (clicks don't matter, we're not using the right attribution metrics, etc. etc.) branded display ads don’t work. The facts are:

1. Unit performance sucks for everyone
2. Any demand gen created goes right to Google

Look at AM Radio - maybe the most comparative medium in user behavior to web publishing. Commercial AM is primarily focused on news, information, gossip & opinion. It is programmed for shorter bursts of attention due to the nature of how people interact with the medium (weather on the 1’s, Traffic on the 8’s, etc.). The web is quick twitch just like AM. Our click behavior online closely mirrors our switching radio stations trying to get the information we desire.

AM is not an immersive medium like its high fidelity sister FM. Rather, AM tailors its content and it’s advertising to audience behavior. As any listener of AM radio knows, direct response (DR) dominates the medium. DR radio ads often play off the trust factor with the station and/or host – both great ways to leverage ad performance non-existent in display advertising (but interestingly present it social media and search).

Direct response radio is a huge business and one dominated with much the same offers that people on the web respond to. The optimization methodologies also closely mirror each other. Interestingly direct response ads are also the ones growing to dominate online. More interesting is this growth is based on performance. Publishers ignore this audience response at their own peril.

This begs the question will there be two webs -- The AM web and the FM web? The answer is yes and it already exists. The FM web is where we go to for rich media experiences - videos, gaming – where we go to have fun. Because these experiences immerse us, the type of marketing should be different. The AM consumption behavior to ‘get what we need and move on’ lends itself much better to DR where in more immersive digital experiences brand messages should wash over so we recall them as we walk through the supermarket.

This brings us back to the misalignment. Revenue starved publishers and budget hungry advertisers have been infatuated with demand gen dollars for display and have gone so far as to rip DR a new one (while gladly taking their ad network backed money). This desire for more media budget has also manifested a false and unaccountable sense that DR ads diminish the publishers own brand value. It’s all a bunch of crap both from a user sentiment perspective and performance perspective.

The lesson is that understanding the way people consume media is paramount to optimizing it for revenue generation both with your original content and your advertiser content. There is much we can learn from Amplitude Modulation.

The solution is a major paradigm shift. DR needs to be embraced, it needs to be “legitimized” and the revenue captured with the publisher’s audience, content and data needs to be distributed in a more equitable manner. The problem is not one of revenue generation. The dollars are there, they just need to be shifted. 

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 5^th SES in San Jose that I created a new presentation below for the session I put together called “Search Becomes the Display Operating System.” Leading off the session my presentation focused on the high level issues hindering display and changes/impact of the more search like system taking hold.

Search Becomes Display

View more presentations from jonathanmendez.

Josh Jacobs, Vice President and GM, Advertising Technology, Yahoo! spoke next and his presentation primarily focused on attribution and using search and display together as the new way of doing business. While I get the need at the CMO level I’ve never been a big of attribution metrics. I think this misses the mark – the mark being that each channel needs performance metrics associated with them and said performance should be optimized and judged based on the in-channel results regardless of the overall picture. As a channel this conversation seems to me to be a red herring used to belittle the underlying value of search and the viability of performance branding in display in an effort to get more dumb money into display. That said, the rest of Josh's presentation was great especially when concentrating on Search retargeting with Yahoo and RMX. Josh had slide animations the likes of which only Yahoo’s marketing & PR team can deliver. Not to mention, Josh seems to be generating traction for my analogy of display as the Golden Shower. Thanks man!

Next was Rajas Moonka, Group Product Manger of Google Content Network. His take was about ease of use for the advertiser with both their enhanced display ad builder launching last week as well as their buying and planning tools. Google was also very upfront about their interest based advertising and the need for data collection transparency touting their already in place systems of targeting opt-out and ad preference manager. I like Google’s view of thinking about display ads as little landing pages (this was after all the reason I ventured into the wilds of display to begin with) and Rajas touched on two points that don’t get enough coverage. 1) Google is media format agnostic across all content including the SERP meaning as long as the creative is helpful or useful to the user performance rules whether it be graphical, video or text ads. 2) There are major data collection and profile creation problems inherent in people conducting so many different actions across channels and platforms – targeting based on these rules is only going to get harder in the coming years, not easier (and who says it works to begin with! :)

The venerable Scot Rafer batted clean-up for data collection & targeting expert Lookery. Scott’s quote about search becoming display’s operating principle served as my inspiration for starting this session at SES NY in the Spring. He is one of the few people in this business that does not bullshit you so it was refreshing to hear him echo Google’s issues around the pratfalls of the data collection business as well as the benefits that can be derived from it. I’ve always been a fan of Lookery approach and view them as the Occam’s Razor of data.

So some great content here and it looks like the Session will continue onthis December in Chicago and by the time we get back the NYC in 2010 the takeover will be in full force. Hopefully we will splinter into two sessions – one on technology and one on strategy.