Jonathan Mendez's Blog

Analytics APIs Will Be Our Bridge to Intelligence

Eric Peterson has a kick ass post titled “The Coming Bifurcation in Web Analytics Tools.” 

In it he defines the bifurcation issue: 

“I believe that we are about to see an increasing number of companies in the coming year drop their paid vendor’s “basic solution” in favor of Google Analytics and, at the same time, seriously consider adding their vendor’s high-end offering.”

Though he does not highlight it, he also mentions what I believe will eventually bridge this predicted bifurcation. That is, the ability to leverage the Analytics API to create more robust and relevant tool sets, not only for workflow and insights, but most importantly for action. He does mention ShufflePoint as an example of a company building off the Google Analytics API and while being a killer workflow add-on it barely scratches the surface of what can be done via an analytics API.

So, I firmly believe that the bifurcation Eric writes about will be temporary. In addition to cost, the API is GA's big competitive advantage in the enterprise.  Google is positioned well and experienced for this future. Over the next few years third parties insanely focused on adding value to "numbers" will create added layers of data intelligence to the core analytics data much the same way bid management and MVT companies added actionable intelligence to the core Search data over the last 5 years.

Though I understand their protectionist mindset, I've been disappointed that Omniture has held back API access to their customers through tokens and the like (though I believe they recently have opened up higher degrees of access to their Genesis partners). I think at some point over the next 12-24 months and as a direct result of Eric’s prediction coming true, they will have no choice but to fully open their API. This will really usher in the next wave of analytics and add serious value to an already insanely valuable medium.

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.

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.

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

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)