Jonathan Mendez's Blog

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 interaction experience anywhere (in our case the click) is an opportunity to create an emotional attachment with your product or service.

So while half the blame for the display implosion rests with strategy the other half rests with technology. Listening to the display industry of late you might believe that the worst is over – that a second coming of display is upon us. Emerging from the wreckage are two saviors that marry new technology with emergent strategy to blend performance with brand. Let’s call them Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Thing 1: The new mode of buying display ads is about buying an audience

Thing 2: The new mode of buying display ads is about using data to optimize

If you recall in The Cat in the Hat, Thing 1 and Thing 2 fly kites around to amuse the advertisers err, children. Ultimately the kids capture the Things and the Cat in the Hat cleans up the mess that was created. Then they all disappear.

In our story Thing 1 and Thing 2 will not clean up the mess that is display advertising either and the disappearing part is ominous. I will follow up soon with a post on issues around data and optimization (in the meantime here is a great look at the challenge from AdExchanger.com) but first I want to first examine Thing 1 - the idea of buying an audience vs. the old way of buying impressions.

Audience: Audience is a group of people collected together in a single place and time. They don’t need to have similar attributes but they share some common interest defined by expressed actions or attendance. The presence of audience is by itself worthless (unless they have bought a ticket – subscription & pay4play models). The value resides in the emotional state that allows for the success of persuasive efforts. This disposition is almost always temporal in nature and as such is something that is most effectively targeted in realtime systems (like search). This is one reason why display consistently fails.

Audience information is useful to target messaging that triggers a response but the underlying emotional state is best mined deep inside the publisher’s content. Search works in a large part because it is content driven. But make no mistake, the dynamic content delivery controlled by the user is still present in publisher environments. What is not built in is effective solutions to derive revenue from the goals of the user and leverage that moment (the kairos).

So if at its core an audience is about interest, intent and action how does this fit in with the buying models now being touted? Data and observation have taught us that online demographics & personas are meaningless for optimizing performance. The web is a user-controlled medium so just like the actions that define people we need to segment and target based on what people are doing, not who they are (as defined by what they’ve done).

Don Norman calls this Activity-Centered Design. He also rightly points out the weakness of human centered design approaches to dynamic sequences -- the very backbone of the event driven medium that is the web. My own optimization work has only validated these same ideas qualitatively and quantitatively across dynamic content and advertising. People are not predictable, but their actions can be a window of predisposition to certain messages and information.

Impressions: If we are being honest with ourselves as an industry the only reason we are moving to audience buying after a dozen years is that impression-based buying/selling has run its course. The problem with buying impressions in display is only that no one actually clicks on the ads. The strategies and platform are of a different time and medium and consequently the ads suck. If we knew CTR would be this bad no one would have ever built this type of system.

On the back-end most of the problems stem from the different goals each participant (publisher, advertiser, visitor) has. This causes multiple inefficiencies or optimization conflict. Display as it exists now is further expanding the delta between the value of publisher’s visitors & content with the revenue generated from third parties. This is not sustainable business for anyone. Eventually in digital optimization no one wins unless everyone wins.

The funny thing with impressions is that when the ads are good you can actually give away the impression for free. In Search the goals of the users (relevance) the advertiser (ROI) and the publisher (revenue) work in lockstep, each helps optimize the success of the other. Search validates the idea of activity targeting vs. audience targeting. This is realtime and dynamic -- what people are doing and what is effective in persuading them to do something.  Proof that audience targeting isn’t needed? Besides language the Google homepage is the same in all 233 countries and has grown to dominate global search. 

Cleaning Up: As the web has become more complex band-aid after band-aid has been added to try and make display work.  Everyone has known about its poor performance for a decade yet few have done anything about it. Those few that have successfully created new ad platforms have not surprisingly had huge exits. However that innovation is now 5-10 years old. The “lost decade” for VC in digital advertising was due to investment in layered approaches to an underlying faulty system rather than brand new ad models (though entrepreneurs surely share some of the blame). 

It’s never too late to build new systems and it seems the need is becoming more obvious. Just yesterday Bernard Lunn of RWW made his siren call. It is my belief that in order to work new solutions must have a ground up approach where the core inputs are content and realtime events and the trigger mechanisms are visitor attributes. Just like the timing needed for ad persuasion, the current rise in APIs, realtime data, IR, semantic tools and desperate publishers signal that the time may now be right for a different conversion event.

More Thoughts:

Brand Marketing in the Digital Age

The Power of Brand to Influence Outcomes or Why Brands Will Always Rule Digital

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

The Brand Optimization Revolution - The Metrics are Coming! The Metrics are Coming!

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 opportunities. As the ramifications of these benefits become understood businesses now have no choice but to support an API superstructure, the pillars of which are content, utility, development and analytics.

But where do forward thinking businesses begin? 

Though APIs have been around quite a while for information we are still in a nascent period of growth for content and utility. Amazingly we’re even earlier in using APIs to optimize digital media and experiences. Can you imagine a fully dynamic web? I know it may seem hard when in some respects we're guilty of leaving the mashup behind with the rest of Web 2.0.

An ambient web calls for strategies that leverage that ubiquity. APIs are they key to this. Semantic web (or the new & improved term, linked data) will also have a big role. As best I can I am sharing my thoughts on how start-up, legacy digital, and traditional businesses should approach an API strategy for their digital business. I welcome your thoughts in the comments. The only thing I know for sure is the ramifications of not having a battle plan are as large as the opportunity for those that do.

Bitly: A Model API Army

There are many approaches to using open content and data however unless you create something that blends the core API components (content, utility, development and analytics) you will always be vulnerable or at a competitive disadvantage. The best example might be in URL shortening.

There are quite a few URL shortening solutions however only bit.ly marries content (linked page), utility (URL shortener & link), development (Calais) and analytics (click data). The sum of bitly's parts are greater than it's whole but even the parts on their own are valuable at different times depending on the goals of the user (and the biz dev goals of bit.ly). This layered approach is why bit.ly is a homerun and should be a case study for how create new solutions using APIs.

So let’s dive into using each of the API components of the web experience together in the manner bit.ly is doing and see what we can learn.

CUDA: The API Stack

Everyone likes to talk about stacks these days so I’ll frame what’s involved in successfully creating API battle plans within your organization in that manner.

I'm calling it CUDA because, well I'm a marketing guy and it sounds cool.

Layer 1) Content APIs: Text, Images, Audio & Video

Since the web is an information medium content APIs present the biggest opportunity but also the biggest challenge. The thing holding back success for content providers might just be themselves. Creating an API is but just one layer of the stack.

The New York Times believes its API will deliver 2.5X the amount of eyeballs on their content. But how? Depending on unknown third parties to bring you revenue from your API is akin to a salesman sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. The content API is your raw material but how you mine it and what you chose to make with it can be the difference between diamonds and coal.

One problem for publishers is that they have never been very good with digital marketing or technology innovation. To make matter worse technology innovations have been publisher agnostic. The fact that the Kindle brings Amazon higher margins on Wall Street Journal subscriptions than the WSJ gets (not to mention the direct loss of revenue and customer relationship to the Journal) should be all the motivation needed for in-house solutions to take priority. When it will happen in earnest is anybody's guess.

Layer 2) Utility APIs: Messaging, Payments, Pricing

It’s becoming clear that messaging, payments and other API based tools &utilities will ultimately lead to the most creative use of APIs. We have already seen this around the API fueled Twitter ecosystem with numerous products being developed off the API and some even being acquired by or partnering with Twitter. I think this area is going to explode in the next year. Integrating utility is a one-time deal with long payoffs for core platforms. For entrepreneurs and VC this biz can also presents a quick flip opportunity.

We’ll soon see more transactional APIs in place with the much-anticipated Facebook payment leading the way. At my own RAMP Digital we’ve incorporated mobile carrier transaction APIs into a display ad to facilitate a subscription purchase from within the ad unit. Solutions like this are just the beginning of the next wave of API fueled utilities.

Layer 3) Development: API Services

In many ways dev is always the core layer. On the path to a true web of services it will be the innovation that can be built on top of it all. http://camelbuy.com/ is a great example. Created using the BestBuy API it delivers a wealth of information and value. It’s a great start but businesses can’t be lulled to sleep believing their API’s success (and ultimately their own) will be taken care of by developers earning affiliate commissions or contest winners.

My last company (Offermatica) built an insanely great web services tool. Instead of API calls we made JavaScript calls. Left to the their own devices most customers were nowhere near able to fulfill the full potential of the technology on their own. This is an old story in new technology. If it's too hard for people to use they just won't. This is the human element to it all.

Creative and media agencies will be of little help. Not until service businesses are built that uniquely understood the technology and have developed methodologies (with results) will the promise be fulfilled. Without services I’m afraid that there will be no case studies, no evangelists, no competition and ultimately no performance improvements for the web. But why build these businesses if there are no customers? Or why not just DIY if you're so smart about it?

If anything is holding back the next web it's not optimizing the content delivery -- it's optimizing the content presentation.

Layer 4) Analytics APIs: Data Profiles, Parameters,

API fed data has already had a profound impact on the web. Google is making 4 billion calls a day on its APIs (think for a second about the competitive advantage they have in place in order to do this).

The first decade of the commercial web saw counting. This new second wave seems to be about insight. This game changer is realtime data. RT is going to change everything from content delivery to dynamic pricing models for ads and traffic.

We are also moving from a browser web to a web where anything can make a request, not just a browser. This requires new ways of collecting and analyzing data along with new ways of optimizing. Good thing that is what we’re using APIs to make it all easier.

Summary

The winners in the first decade of the commercial web were sites like Amazon and Google that focused on performance, user experience, testing and optimization in order to deliver relevance and revenue. The winners over the next decade will be those that take those same tenets and apply them to how they aggregate and develop the content, utility and data that APIs will deliver. We are at a point in time where we are optimizing how we incorporate what the web has to offer. Unlike before, it now offers us everything.

Some Previous Thoughts on APIs:

Using APIs to Mashup Ads & Landing Pages

Why Mashups are Mandatory for Marketers

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

Think Like a Search Engine – APIs & User Control

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

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.

Google Will Own Realtime Search by Indexing, Filtering and Ranking Tweets Better than Twitter

The conventional thinking now is that Twitter’s search will spell trouble for Google. I believe that it will be Google that will be the first to filter tweets and deliver useful, relevant results sets. This seems so obvious yet I have not seen anyone write about it yet. Maybe the Twitterati is high on their own supply.

Why is Twitter different than any other pub? Its technology is not core search but personal messaging and content. It is Google that spells trouble for Twitter as the value of the content generated via Twitter will be sucked into Google just as any other publisher. Of course, GOOG will then monetize that content in a way Twitter will not be able to do either -- same as every other publisher relying on ad supported models.

This is happening already. In the past week or so Google has starting to index tweets in its natural results set. There is little doubt this will continue to gain velocity and that there is a team at Google working on tweaking algos for RTS and Twitter content. There is enough data in Twitter to do whatever Google needs to do with it to incorporate tweets as relevant search results.

Google will do a great job of filtering the noise out of Twitter, determining authority and providing useful RTS. This is their core competency! Also, let’s face it, real-time search is not really real-time. There is a latency to Twitter, a latency to Tweetdeck a latency to Google. And the ultimate value as anyone who has done a twitter search can attest is not in the recency, the value is in relevance. But make no mistake about it, Google will have no problem indexing and ranking tweets within seconds.

I also believe as soon as people see Twitter results in the Google SERP there will be little reason to go to Twitter to search. Most users are on third party interfaces anyway and Google is omnipresent in most toolbars. Don’t underestimate the Google habit for search.

I previously assessed the value of Twitter and Real-Time Search (RTS) from a user perspective. From a technical perspective as with all other search results there needs to be authority, filters and results sets. I believe Google can already do this better than Twitter. Competing with Google in search is not where Twitter should be headed unless they are prepared for the nuclear option, robots.txt Twitter.

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?