Jonathan Mendez's Blog

The New Google Era

Something has been happening on the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). It is the very thing that the FTC just closed the case on. It is the delivery on the promise that Larry and Sergey made from the beginning. That Google would organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. The keywords (pun intended) are “organize” and “access”. You see none of this information has ever belonged to Google. They are just the interface.

Ah, the interface. Not long ago it was about getting you off Google as quickly as possible:

“Our goal is to make sure that people can find what they’re looking for and get off the page as quickly as possible.”

- Marissa Mayer, January 2007

Call it better organization, quicker access or more relevance but more and more the middle layer of the “result” is pushed a step closer. Nothing that has ever happened in Search, NOTHING, is as disruptive.

“we’re trying to move from answers that are link-based to answers that are algorithmically based, where we can actually compute the right answer. And we now have enough artificial intelligence technology and enough scale and so forth that we can”

- Eric Schmidt, May 2011

This is having impact across digital media that few have thought about yet. Even fewer have strategies to succeed in this new era. The quickest losers (some examples below) will be weather queries (goodbye Weather Channel on the web, hello Weather Channel as an app), online dictionaries (goodbye AdSense revenue) and of course Wikipedia.

Wikipedia will be the largest loser.

In many respects Wikipedia came to epitomize the first era of commercial Search. Those 10 blue text links and always near the top of those results, Wikipedia. Those days are over.

Wikipedia will still serve a great purpose for Google. It will still get massive traffic. It will always be the standard bearer for user generated content and the possibilities of webscale. But its glory days are behind it. A whole generation of web users are coming online that will never have a need for it. Traffic will drop precipitously and over time support. The rise in mobile devices (as the example queries above so clearly demonstrate) will only serve to expedite this.

The fact that so few people even in digital media have been paying attention to this sea change is not new for Search. Search snuck up on people to begin with. Many people thought directories, especially Yahoo and ODP would rule forever. Search ads were not even counted by the Interactive Adverting Bureau their first few years of existence. Things called Rich Snippets, Linked Data and RDFa are changing everything and this is boring stuff for most media people because they have no concept of the consequences.

Maybe it is because these changes have been a slow boil. I first wrote about this stuff (can it be?) 6.5 years ago. But while the pace of change has been slow its result is the culmination of everything people thought the web would become, especially its inventor.  

All of this is going to be advantageous to Google’s bottom line. They are just too smart and have been preparing for this too long. Google gets justifiably raked over the coals for lack of understanding how to leverage the changes in web use.  They get far, far, too little respect for their vision and understanding of how to leverage the changes in web technology.

Fewer searchers leaving Google and going to other sites mean more people clicking on ads on Google O&O. It means Google takes even more share of digital ad spend – now approaching the value of all of print and half of television.

Where does that leave everyone else?

1) Brands will be more important than ever

2) EVERYONE will be in the advertising/marketing business

3) Content must have value beyond the “rich snippet”

Navigating that construct will be where the game is played.

The search for information has changed forever. It is now right in front of you. Next will be getting it to you before you even know you need it. Until then, enjoy the relevance and plan your digital media strategies accordingly.

Taste Graphs and the Future of User Controlled Media

My friend Andy Weissman posted some really interesting ideas last week on the future of branded media that got me thinking.

“we are moving to a world where almost everything is available, basically on demand. The problem for users in this environment is no longer "what CAN I watch" (or read or listen to). Instead, the problem for users is now "what SHOULD I watch " (or read or listen to). The problem has moved from *can* to *should*.”   

I think Andy is leaving out the most important problem for users of all in an attention constrained media world – what do I WANT to watch or read or listen to. Here's why:

We’ve exploded the limited paradigm (MGM made 50 films a year – every year in their golden age) that fueled traditional media. Instead of gravitational centers (sports, entertainment, jazz) you have millions of distributed nodes connected to lose centers – or in many cases not centers at all. The genie can never go back in the bottle.

This took place because creation and discovery costs are zero. Making and consuming content are both free. Because of that our “taste palette” has expanded. It’s not that these tastes did not exist before. It’s that both the creation of new tastes and our ability to satiate existing tastes makes taste-making more difficult than ever. Disney is a good example of traditional media's difficulty with this shift. They just fired Rich Ross who was their tastemaker extraordinaire in TV. Responsible for Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers and more he failed miserably trying to judge the tastes of moviegoers - in the same demographic!

This medium is under public control. This has to be the foundation of any conversation about its future or business models involved in it. This power shift reaches its zenith in our ability to query the medium. The web is a database. It is a series of requests and responses. It is client and a server. You can almost always get what you want and most times get what you need.

Like cars? There is plenty of great content for you. If you’re into muscle cars there is content. If you’re into Pontiac muscle cars there is content. If you’re into Pontiac GTO’s there is content. If you’re into 1967 Pontiac GTOs there is content. Better yet - the further down you go in the taste funnel the more likely you are to find community that will provide the socialization of content. The niches keep getting bigger. They were always there. They just never had an organizing particle until digital content - or a path to that content before search.

That’s an amazing thing – the further down you drill the more likely you are to gain access to deeper content and community. And when discovery is self-directed it works best. Here’s an example that involves Andy and myself.

His tweet the other day:

brought me to this – one of the most interesting and personally valuable pieces of content I read all week:

http://gratefuldeadprojects.com/Morning_Dew.html

I got there through a search I conducted and it was fascinating to see the intersection of both align with what Google is doing. They are bringing in the social signals to help discovery. Here’s proof:

That's Andy's smiling face in my personal result set. Bringing it full circle (pun intended) to Andy's blog post, Google appears just as, if not more, interested in luring brands into Google+ than people.

The web is exploding. The lookup tables of the web database are changing. More nodes need to be indexed and understood. Social is the best graph schema for this new world because - and here’s where everyone gets it wrong and Andy gets it right - in a self directed media world influence can never be captured and indexed but taste, taste is on demand.

 

Optimize and Prophesize 2010 Highlights

2010 was my fifth year of blogging and my second year on Twitter. My number of blog posts have continued to trend down the past few years, though my posts these days tend to be more thought out and longer – so hopefully the quality has gone up. I looked back on my blog posts from the past year and collected my favorites below. Thank you to everyone who spent any of their precious time during 2010 on my blog. Enjoy the Holidays and I look forward to sharing more thoughts with you in 2011.

- Jonathan

Thoughts on Online Advertising

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

Ten Intent Triggers for Digital Media

Online Advertising is Not an Intent Generation Channel

Search Vs. Social: A Game Over Before it Started

Links vs. Cookies: A Tale of Two Web Economies

Thoughts on Online Publishing Monetization

The Market Value of Supply Side Data

Display’s Matching Problem

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Segmentation in the Age of Data Objects

Unlocking the True Value of Digital with User Flows

Another Brick in the Paywall

Thoughts on Online Privacy

The Web is Not an Ad Supported Medium

My Thoughts on Online Privacy

Presentations

Display Advertising's New Wave

Optimizing Conversion Rate for the Mobile Web

Interviews

AdExchanger

ExchangeWire

 

 

Algorithmic Search and Discovery

When Rich Skrenta who has been a pioneer in Search with Topix (and just launched Blekko) writes the following, I take notice:

“Algorithmic search is sinking.

The only way to combat this and return trust and quality to search is by taking an editorial stand and having humans identify the best sites for every category. The algorithm can't find its way through the web's growing hall of mirrors anymore. And it's only going to get worse.”

However, Rich is only referring to one set of algos that are sinking. On the paid side algos are certainly rising, not sinking. A HUGE number of transactional queries end up clicking the ads - that are often more relevant (due to a/b testing of headlines and the like) and more useful than the underlying organic results.

Paid search aside, I take issue with Rich's solution of human editors/curation. I'd like to put the context of the problem in a different light. That of the multitude of wonderful mid/small retailers out there that people should not be afraid to buy from.

This has been the case since day 1 of the web. In fact, a few pretty nice sized web businesses have been built on the backs of these types of retailers. If we look at the current/latest major Google algo changes (May Day et al) the SERPs (once again) have skewed towards the Amazon's and Wal-marts of the world. This is the gentrification of the SERPs and I think it's a bad thing for Search.

At its core Search is about discovery. We should not be solving Search's problems by placing limits on our ability to discover especially if the solution - human curation - can be just as harmful and limiting in this regard as any algorithm. In fact, I'd argue human curation will be more limiting to discovery than Algorithmic Search.

Don’t think this type of human curation and editorial controls does not extend to content discovery the same way that it does commerce discovery. We’ve seen a great rise in curated content streams and it has an important place. However, any of us that have used Search to find out about information have surely stumbled onto helpful, useful and important blogs or other articles, essays, papers that we NEVER would have been exposed to without the algorithm.

The answer is not either or. The answer is both. The more tools we have on this web for information discovery the more we can discover and the better that experience can be. Yes, we’re navigating rough waters but the algorithm should not and will not end up as a wreck on the ocean floor, but rather a vessel that can and will help us discover new lands.

 

 

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Segmentation in the Age of Data Objects

 Almost everyday of the past 12 years I’ve looked at web analytic data. It’s never been a completely satisfying experience. Log files don’t paint a vivid picture and javascript’s palette of data points is often a mess. At the end of the day, it is all “just numbers.” It doesn’t tell me what to do. It doesn’t do it for me. It doesn’t let me shape it as I want to.

Reports are the output of modern web analytics. Sites are layered with tags on top of the page and tables are created for the data to sit and be compiled. There have been recent advances in reporting itself, namely solutions like Chartbeat (one of the great startup names) that provide realtime data streams. This leapfrogs data delivery over the hours of latency that exists in the site analytics space. But even realtime analytic data is still just a report, only a little more interesting by being timely. The Achilles heel of all site analytics continues to be the ability to mashup datasets from the report tables, an essential first step for segmentation and thus actionable analytics. Not only is this useful for look backs but it also delivers the flexibility needed to create new measurement tables.

Whether it was intentional or not Site Optimization tools emerged a few years ago and began to fill this gap. While they were used to optimize website performance they were marketed as Testing tools. Who could argue for the need to test? Their liftoff was an exciting time in the market. Initially these tools paid great attention to the content targeting aspect of the product, the object. This was done not to the neglect of the product but to the simplicity of early versioning.  More and more though it became clear that segmentation was what would really exponentially improve the application of the technology.

The past few years Web analytic tools have evolved to some degree and added more robust segmentation ability (AdWords being the ultimate segmentation creation and reporting tool). As everyone involved in optimizing the web in one way or another knows, it is the keystone to success. I do believe however that success for these solutions are still limited by the underlying data collection and warehousing methods that ultimately affect their ability to make the analytics actionable.

To be more specific, as in other applications, there is limited flexibility in data collection approaches and tables requiring a top-down approach to creating data sets that form the building blocks of intelligent segment creation. Top-down is the classic breaking down of systems to look at the sub systems compositional structure. It informed software engineering until the rise of object-oriented programming in the mid 90’s. For the most part it is the way web analytics works today.

Like the exciting rise of the OOP paradigms that now power the web, at Yieldbot we are really exciting about new bottom-up approaches to data set and segmentation creation possible using these same paradigms. We believe data needs to be as flexible and realtime as the web itself.  There is great power in the ability to take data, make it a sub-system of the platform and enable it to be shaped based on the goals of campaign. Just as the semantic web has opened up metadata with bottom-up RDF and microformats we will see a new wave of analytics will bring the same mashup ability to data. We’re already doing it.

As if that’s not enough incentive for bottom-up data approaches, as more and more data inputs/outputs are API generated (another area current web analytic solutions are lagging) the ability to take bottom-up approaches become even more mission critical. The best example of this is Display advertising. The speed to power new markets using APIs driven data are beyond showing the potential, they are generating returns for the DSPs, Exchanges and RTB using it.

Interestingly, unlike the data sharing advances in media buying, the analytics of advertising is spreadsheet wasteland with scarce little BI. One wonders how this situation exists when it is marketers and advertisers that need segmentation most of all. Segmentation breeds efficiency. Segmentation delivers relevance. Segmentation elicits emotion. Segmentation and twin sister matching sit in the middle of all that’s relevant in digital. Over the next few years it will increasingly become the difference of success or failure. Who’s matching you? And now the new question, how are they doing it? Bottoms up!

 

Yieldbot is Born to Run

 Two years ago after Omniture purchased Offermatica and I started Relevance AMPlified (RAMP)  I stated three core principles of what I was doing next:

1.    Intent & affinity are the root segmentation strategies

2.    Achieve success w/ the most advanced technology

3.    Testing, targeting & optimization is our DNA

These ideals are also evident in everything that Yieldbot is and will become. Now after a year of work it is time to share Yieldbot with the world.

Yieldbot really started to come together last April when I decided to pivot from building ad side technology to having it be publisher technology. Simply put, there is so little publisher technology and such a crushing need for it. I had a pretty clear vision of what I wanted to create but I knew I needed help from people smarter than me. Also, I knew that even though we were building a display technology the problems that needed to be solved were not ones that legacy “display” people would be right for.

Fortunately Scott Rafer introduced me to Donna Romer and her background in pattern recognition and semantic search was (no pun intended) a perfect match. Donna and I spent almost everyday from May to September last year whiteboarding exactly what we needed to build. This groundwork was crucial. With all the start-up advice around the web you don't hear about this approach but we couldn't have built such a great product without clearly mapping the vision first.

Looking for an engineer to actually build it in New York proved difficult. I was already picking David Cancel’s brain on the project and he connected me with an amazing engineer in the Boston area that was another perfect fit. In early November Richard Shea started building Yieldbot. Richard is my favorite type of engineer  - one that uses code in a way as creative as any art. We’re going to keep running engineering from Boston and with the bounty of analytics, CDN and other relevant engineering talent up there I think it’s a great decision.

The most enjoyable part of this has been the literally hundreds of people I’ve met and talked with over the past couple of years as this idea has taken shape. Publishers, Advertisers, Engineers, Founders, Angels, VC. I’ve chatted up Yieldbot everywhere from the nicest executive offices of the world’s top media companies to the hood of a beat up old Subaru. At the end of the day technology is essential but people and relationships are what makes things happen.

So, my “Crusade for Relevance” in the digital medium continues with a new chapter. As always I’ll continue to blog my thoughts on it here. If you want to follow Yieldbot he’s on twitter @yieldbot and if you are interested as a publisher visit our site here. Rave on!

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.