Disqus - Latest Comments for btomasette

Re: Rob's Musings: Our 2012 Honda Pilot Twins Plus Newborn Car Seat Challenge

BmoreWire — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 15:40:24 -0000

How much cash you sink into car seat technology in total at this point?

Re: Feature Friday: Zemanta Thumbnails

BmoreWire — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:45:38 -0000

Greg are you available for voice work?

Re: Learning Ruby on Rails for the Non-Developer

BmoreWire — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:36:42 -0000

Glad to help but this is way old and out-dated so I would fact check with more up to date versions. I know rails 3 had some updates and since then I've actually switched over to almost exclusively Python Tornado and pure python development.

Re: HTML5 (continued)

BmoreWire — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:33:29 -0000

A lot of comments on this blog make me realize that most people in this industry have a very superficial surface understanding about technology. Claiming that html5 is making all of this is possible is only a shallow fraction of the truth. Advances in javascript engines and the way browser handle javascript and advances in the webservers delivering this content has a lot more to do with these apps and the performance of them than html5......not to mention most of the cool stuff that you think is HTML5 that gives you a flash-like experience is really CSS3.

I just think it's funny how people claim they want a certain technology or code used.....like I believe i read a comment where someone was talking about C running in Chrome. Trust me, you don't want to have to write wesites in C. Nothing would ever get done.....

So my suggestion to all the investors, marketers, business side people, and consumers who think they are investor/founder/ceo/advisor/product managers, either drop $100 on some programming books and invest the time an effort to understand the underpinnings of the business you claim to be an expert in, or talk in terms of the features, functionalities, and benefits of technology products rather than the code language it was written in.

Re: Back To Basics - Re-Targeting

BmoreWire — Sun, 22 May 2011 15:05:54 -0000

Good questions.

1. 'pixel' is typically a misnomer when talking about re-targeting and this confusion only comes up when a more technical person is approaching. The 'pixel' can be a 1x1 pixel using and img call where in the http get img call they server checks/writes and then records an event server side. Or it can be a javascript doing a cross-domain ajax call doing the same thing, or it can be an iframe showing a page that then shows the img call and doing other calls based on the cookie's presence or status.

2. For the product page question, this is done in two ways. More sophisticated re-targeting tags will grab a product id, or a piece of html or dom object from the product and associate that server side with the user's cookie id. That said, some people manually hard code a different pixel for every product page so if that pixel is shown they know the user has hit that product page and then they use yet another pixel to show all of the time across the site to indicate a user has merely been to their site.

3. The producty id can be passed on to the adserver in a multitude of ways. One way is via params as you suggest, another is that the pixel's url may have a unique id or attribute and may have been hard coded for that page. Yet another way is that an additional cookie id is written to the user's cookie so the user's activity is stored client side rather than server side so that when they are elligible for an ad call they have an attribute stored in that domain's cookies. (this method is waning in popularity because it's less easy to aggregate consumer info or synch cookies with other adservers if the data is stored client side and it pushes the burden of ad decisioning to a client side script that is computed at runtime so you are dependant upon the user's machine to run the script in order to run the ad)

4. How is the user recognized? Yes, the http get checks for the availability of cookies with the adserver's domain and then writes a new unique one (or many) if it does not exist. Though this can be done with another pixel this is typically done with multiple GET's in the ad call as most ad calls are not a single image call but rather an iframe or javascript library where you can do multiple calls. i.e. check/write cookie, return the ad Again, on this one some adservers have a complex javascript library that decisions on which ad to call based on a number of cookie attributes in the cookie and does the computation at runtime on the client's machine but the newer more modern ones simply have one cookie id and do all of the processing server side.

Re: http://mobtownlabs.com/post/4608271228

BmoreWire — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 10:28:53 -0000

thanks. To be clear I just found this on slideshare, I didn't make it.

Re: Gavin Deadman Discusses DSP Algorithms, In-House Exchange-Buying, And The PV Impression

BmoreWire — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:15:08 -0000

Great commentary and exactly what I was looking for. The 35% stat is hugely important and the cost savings comment in cutting out the middle man. That is a message that marketing departments need to understand and that it takes higher paid talent to bring people in-house and the efficiencies will pay dividends. This is tough to swallow especially at public companies in this economy where the easy money to cut to make a quarter is in marketing.

Thanks again.

Re: Gavin Deadman Discusses DSP Algorithms, In-House Exchange-Buying, And The PV Impression

BmoreWire — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:18:22 -0000

I'm in the US and wasn't looking for a good recruiter, but was more looking for commentary on the fact that it is not easy to attract talent to a marketing department when you are competing with tech startups and big agencies which is why many marketers end up outsourcing their Trading Desk buying functions.

Re: Gavin Deadman Discusses DSP Algorithms, In-House Exchange-Buying, And The PV Impression

BmoreWire — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:20:40 -0000

Good article. What kind of training did you do or how did you hire to be able to bring in house?

Re: How Important is Giving Credit

BmoreWire — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:07:37 -0000

Peter, thanks for the comment.
You make some good points. I guess one thing that I left out is that you are always going to have a bucket of unknown traffic. The key is to minimize that bucket and even if it's unknown, track it anyway as unknown. So with Tagman we can get search, natural search, all paid display advertising, known affiliates, and known referrers such as a PR source, sponsorship source, a news source or something like that. Then you always have another group of visitors that are either true type-in traffic or a referrer that you haven't categorized and device right now isn't categorized in what we are doing.

That said for us it's all about paid media. So when I buy display, search, or affiliate advertising, how is it affecting my ability to add net incremental customers to my client each month. So as I push on a particular buy, how does it affect everything else. i.e. I buy a Yahoo Hompeage and see search, and affiliate, and natural search spike up. Or a news story hits about my advertiser and I get a bunch of referrers from CNN.com and I see click thru rate go up on display and conversion rate go up on Search.

So, I agree with you that categorizing by device will become more and more relevant as adoption increases and more advertisers build out mobile and ipad sites that you can actually transact on, but right now a large majority of our customers come from the regular website so whether something happened on an iphone, android device, or ipad upstream of that sale or not I will still be able to see how all of my paid channels are affected by it because the actual sale or lead happened on the normal website.

Re: Top Records of 2010

BmoreWire — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 09:51:45 -0000

I really think the Kanye West album is massively over-rated. I mean Pitchfork gave it a 10 and now you have it on your top albums of the year. Does itunes have their mp3's mis-labeled or something because I'm hearing run of the mill mediocre hip hop....

Re: Editing Myself

BmoreWire — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 09:38:47 -0000

Poor Richard

Re: Ruby Language Center - MongoDB - 10gen Confluence

BmoreWire — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:46:25 -0000

So are you saying I should update to 1.9 with MacRuby and then deal with the
header issue?

Re: Ruby Language Center - MongoDB - 10gen Confluence

BmoreWire — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:16:08 -0000

using a mac ruby 1.8.7 rails 3.0.0

Re: Ruby Language Center - MongoDB - 10gen Confluence

BmoreWire — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:14:44 -0000

I'm getting this error when i try to install bson_ext any thoughts?

$ sudo gem install bson_ext
Password:
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing bson_ext:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
mkmf.rb can't find header files for ruby at /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/ruby.h

Gem files will remain installed in /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/bson_ext-1.0.7 for inspection.
Results logged to /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/bson_ext-1.0.7/ext/cbson/gem_make.out

Re: Ping

BmoreWire — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 09:43:26 -0000

It kills me that they bought and shut down lala.com. I loved that site.

Re: Flying Blind vs Flying With Instruments

BmoreWire — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:19:43 -0000

I think Radio and TV DR advertising are ripe to pave the way for big brand (much like it did on internet). People with large DR budgets like myself are starting to tap out channels like search as specific keywords get more and more competitive and good optimization technology gets more and more accessible to all advertisers.

This is making me push more money into display and spend my way into figuring out display channels. And that is leading to discussions with cable TV networks for DR testing. A pretty useful company called Ring Revenue helps with call tracking and basically acts as an adserver for TV/Radio/online inbound calls which is helping us DR advertisers who have spend the past few years online go back into offline channels. So I guess it's a set of instruments to let you try flying offline again on your own.

Re: Flying Blind vs Flying With Instruments

BmoreWire — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:13:19 -0000

It's actually amazing how much higher your conversion rate is if the host reads the commercial (even if recorded) versus if you just run it as a non-host read.

Re: Removing a bee hive from the LVIS Building

BmoreWire — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:19:23 -0000

Please start a ghostbuster style bee removal service.

Re: Attribution’s effect on The Ad Market - Demand Side

BmoreWire — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:33:13 -0000

I'll check that out. Thanks.

Re: Attribution’s effect on The Ad Market - Demand Side

BmoreWire — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:39:58 -0000

So serving from your own domain truly is the best way to do this. That said for really good placements like mail, homepages, big new sites....they will never allow client domain adserving or even 1x1 pixel ad tracking. (I've tried) A good interim solution is Tagman and/or Appnexus as they allow you to store and access the event log data so you have the intelligence but there needs to be a little tech work done to really do it right. I know some other big name agencies are hiring high profile tech firms to do this but it will still be disconnected with the displaying of the ad and the rotating of the ad.

Furthermore it would be preferable to be on the same domain, but there are plenty of cross domain tricks with Flash Shared Objects or Javascript Domain Objects that can be passed to get the job done in an anonymous non PII way. It gets a little complex and when you get into the tech of it, you start to wonder if the effort is going to be worth it.........aaaaand this is probably where Jonathan would say that we are doing a lot of work to chase 1%. I disagree with that, but we will find out......

Re: Attribution’s effect on The Ad Market - Demand Side

BmoreWire — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:24:51 -0000

Agreed James. But I guess my point is search is starting to become overly competitive and even cost prohibitive for fishing where the fish are in some keywords and some verticals and we are finding through targeting display and other ad formats, it's more efficient to get some users elsewhere.

Re: Attribution’s effect on The Ad Market - Demand Side

BmoreWire — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:46:15 -0000

Well we don't do creative, purely buying, analytics, attribution. That said I feel that though you can use attribution as a crutch to identify what you're doing, if you are tasked with growing the business or cutting cost, then you really need to laser focus in on what is working and what is not and find where you can push on a specific media or creative to drive efficiency or scale and attribution modeling helps you find that.

Re: Attribution’s effect on The Ad Market - Demand Side

BmoreWire — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:20:22 -0000

Agreed, I used to work for an ad network and media company and making attribution is a tempting tool to make things look like they're working but now I am on the buying/agency side so I have no motivation to make things look like they're working if they are not (not like I ever would have). I look forward to sharing more details as I prove concepts.

Re: Attribution’s effect on The Ad Market - Demand Side

BmoreWire — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:58:21 -0000

You have a right to your opinion, and I appreciate the challenge, but I don't agree with you and the more data mining I do, the more I find the contrary to your statement.