Disqus - Latest Comments for jonathanmendez

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Why Online Ads Haven't Built Brands

jonathanmendez — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 12:30:54 -0000

I'm sure even you agree that brands are not built in any one silo. The example you give around necktie brands is an example. Branding happens across multiple dimensions. To say online ads haven't built a brand is like saying "radio" or "billboards" can't build a brand. They can't either, by themselves.

Online ads are part of digital and if you don't think digital can grow a brand (in this I including web site, app, online ads, analytics, etc) than I'd like to introduce you to Uber and AirBnB.

Re: My Last Day at Moz. My First Day at SparkToro.

jonathanmendez — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 09:33:47 -0000

I just went through a very similar transition 5 months ago with leaving the company I founded after 8 years as CEO. The emotions are hard to suppress and it's impossible not to become reflective. Remember, what lasts are the relationships and the impact that you made on people's lives and careers. I know you're already starting to understand that the past day. That understanding will grow with time. That's where true success in life is found and measured - not a spreadsheet. It's the impact you make on those around you. You have accomplished more success with that than just about anyone I've ever seen not only in Marketing, but in any field. Hold your head high.

I just read a great quote by Ross Perot of all people that he said to Steve Jobs after he invested in NeXT. This was after every VC in SV turned Steve Jobs down after he got booted from Apple. Perot told Jobs, "I pick the jockeys and the jockeys pick the horse and ride them." Sounds like you picked a great horse to ride, or should I say bull.

All the best to you and Geraldine. Godspeed on your next journey.

Re: Top 100 MLB Prospects 2018 | BaseballAmerica.com

jonathanmendez — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 09:27:54 -0000

I don't understand how Mike Soroka continues to be underrated. Coming out of HS from Canada he was ranked 79th by PG. After pitching incredible as a 19 yo in AA he has 8 RHP ranked ahead of him on this list. Kid is big, durable and has plenty of development left. His control is already + and he knows how to pitch far beyond his years and experience unlike other ahead of him who are still throwers. Possible we could see him pitch in the majors as a 20 yo. Not sure how he doesn't crack that 10-14 RHP list.

Re: 2017 Top 100 Prospects | BaseballAmerica.com

jonathanmendez — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 08:59:23 -0000

Is this a record number of Yankees in the BA Top 100?

Re: The Media Briefing

jonathanmendez — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 14:04:54 -0000

First off, most of the business leaders of the media industry have very little idea how revenue truly is generated online. The best example of this is the fact you mention that revenues at YouTube and Facebook are growing exponentially despite the enormous amounts of content that exist and are added each day. Those business get what drives rev.

Publishers couldn't live without data and analytics on site performance. They have almost no data and analytics on ad performance. They do not treat ads as part of the user /content experience. Full stop. I'm not talking about native ads either. I am talking about performance data and optimization.

Google and Facebook run countless algorithms on relevance of the ads and their effectiveness. Not a single publisher you mention here does this. This is despite the fact that they have an abundance of first party data that can drive this. It's simple. Advertisers buy ads based on ad effectiveness. This is more measurable than ever. But go ask a publisher for a given source of traffic to a given url and a given ad slot and a given creative for a given advertiser what the CTR was or the post click performance for the advertiser. They have no idea, let alone the ability to improve it the next time. Ask them the same thing about an article and they will tell you all about how they have tested the headlines and are measuring pageviews and social amplitude in real-time. Who gives a shit without understanding the associated ad performance?

These publishers have been waiting around for "brand" advertising to move to them with the same bullshit measurement that they used in print. The fact is brands are moving to the web but guess what, in the most measurable medium they are measuring!!!

P&G is buying based on how long the site visit is driven by their ad. Merck is buying based on how many pages the person who click the ad consumed on Merck's own website. Google, Facebook, they get this and have built systems to optimize for these metrics and advertiser goals. The actually price the ads based on this performance. The rest of media? They are still trying to get homepage sponsorships.

It's not about the content at all. In fact the more liquidity/content the smarter these algorithms can match ads. It's not about the business model either. Advertisers buy ads to get people to buy shit. Always and forever. It's not even about the data. Publishers /content creators have the richest data available to advertisers. It is about the technology. Google and Facebook are media technology companies focused on measured advertiser performance - plain and simple. Everything else they do feeds off this foundation.

Unless other media companies can turn themselves into the same nothing else they do will prevent their becoming irrelevant for advertisers which will make them irrelevant to readers since they'll be nothing to read - unless it's on Facebook or Google.

Re: Publishers weigh the downsides to header bidding - Digiday

jonathanmendez — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 10:05:33 -0000

I was just in a room with 150 publishers and the speaker asked them how many of them who used header bidding. Then he asked that group how many saw revenue increase over 30%. Everyone who had done header bidding had their hand up. There's nothing more to it than that. You can debate tactics and partners but the bottom line is this is publisher revenue that was being taken by third parties to the inventory that is not going to publishers. That is important and a fundamental change in ad tech.

Re: Header Bidding – Another Nail in the Second-Price Coffin

jonathanmendez — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 10:40:52 -0000

This is solved for publishers. Smart Publishers are putting their header partners into race conditions for the bid and accepting via price priority in their ad server decisioning. That solves for all of this. The problem is legacy demand side technologies that can't compete on speed or price. Good riddance.

Re: Publishers and programmatic: Discontent gives rise to header bidding - Digiday

jonathanmendez — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 10:14:32 -0000

"publishers are in need of a sell-side technology that allows them to take advantage of the revenue wins from header bidding while steering clear of the downsides."

Exactly! And for 4 years, 1000 publishers and 5B pageviews a month, Yieldbot has been providing that.

Re: Video Of The Week: Gabriel Weinberg on Search and Privacy

jonathanmendez — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 14:07:44 -0000

Too bad the ad is completely irrelevant

Re: Facebook shifts focus from FBX, Pinterest distances itself from Instagram

jonathanmendez — Sun, 25 Jan 2015 22:38:16 -0000

Said this over a year ago

https://twitter.com/jonatha...

Re: Graffiti

jonathanmendez — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 10:33:51 -0000

Yieldbot office wall done by the amazing T-Kid http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: Sometimes wrong

jonathanmendez — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 08:44:50 -0000

sounds like 'you had one of those flashes'

Re: Explainer: Your Financial Data Is Being Used to Serve You Better Ads

jonathanmendez — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 18:53:36 -0000

You are saying a company like CVS/Caremark sells PHI to Pharma. That's quite a claim. Seems like it might be a federal crime according to HIPPA.

Re: The Search For The Next Platform

jonathanmendez — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 10:10:18 -0000

Facebook is an ad platform. Google is an ad platform.

Re: The plague of uniform rectangles with text overlays spreads further, risks becoming news-web-wide contagion

jonathanmendez — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 20:12:13 -0000

I thought it was to get people to accidentally clicked on "native" ads.

Re: Why The Banner Ad Is Heroic, and Adtech Is Our Greatest Artifact

jonathanmendez — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 23:57:51 -0000

First party data is important because the analytics and deep
learning needed for high performance (requests) require that the source and timing of the data collection be dimensionalized. Without that it is impossible to expect that the application of that data can be used in the right context or timing. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be a service layer that provides the analytics (a new kind of Omniture for example) and one that provides the timing (a new kind of Ad Server). I see opportunity for vendor models and there is a great deal of innovation that can happen here. I have first hand knowledge it is.

RPR is the future because this is exactly how the web functions. Every click is a request to a server that processes that request and responds with the matching resource. When we create real-time systems that can be embedded as applications within this layer they will function better than other systems that are really hacks (I would argue cookie based display is this type of system – but that’s for another time). You can see the advantage this provides Paid Search as the system operates on real-time user requests. It is pull vs. push - a very important distinction in understanding these systems. They are user controlled like the medium itself.

Another great representative example of RPR is Waze where
your timing and context is pulled in real-time. Waze processes that to respond with helpful and useful information depending on your location, your speed and other rules. Proof there can be innovation here -- but also in the long run that Google will keep this market cornered as it's core of web monetization.

Re: Why The Banner Ad Is Heroic, and Adtech Is Our Greatest Artifact

jonathanmendez — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 14:38:48 -0000

Programmatic display to date has been built on re-targeting
data. By definition this is latent data modeled on previous actions or
behaviors. Also, with the increased speed of the web 100-250ms is becoming too
long to make the necessary computations prior to page load. Advanced systems require pre-calcs (similar to what AdWords does) to be done at the page or request
level which means that these systems must be first-party (in addition to the
privacy issues that are resolved being first party). It also requires more
static data sets with higher signal to noise ration than what is used today in
RTB and back-end data (outcomes) that need to be looped back in to aid in
decision intelligence. This is not commonly part of RTB.

I agree 100% with your vision of the future and have devoted a career to building it but what you describe is a targeting system that today more closely resembles site-side optimization technology doing things like landing page optimization (Adobe Test&Target), content recommendation (Outbrain) and cross-sell/up sell (Amazon) than what is known as “programmatic adtech” or "RTB" serving banners and represented in the LUMAscape.

Re: The Amount of Questionable Online Traffic Will Blow Your Mind

jonathanmendez — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 17:21:06 -0000

Important piece here that this shines a light on video - which is a market rife with fraudulent views and publishers that are often guilty as anyone. Mike - please don't stop investigating, you are doing the industry a great service. And nice work by Dr. Fou as well to keep uncovering shady practices.

Re: Newspapers’ ad consortium with Yahoo reboots

jonathanmendez — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 12:21:25 -0000

the results were poor. this was sold as being mostly about yahoo's hotjobs offering which never materialized in revenue as expected and many publications were locked up from doing other deals because of the exclusivity demands. it's remarkable that this is rebooting.

Re: Here Come The Bots: Assessing the Latest Ad Fraud Fear

jonathanmendez — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 12:03:08 -0000

“What they don’t know is that those networks are often buying traffic further downstream from botnets or other nefarious sources. They might not intend to, but they’re often purchasing bot traffic."

calling bullshit. they know.

Re: [ ]

jonathanmendez — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:04:44 -0000

"when we are told that the ‘pageview is dead’, what we are actually being told is that ‘analytics platforms are dying"

It could be that. It could also be that they have been used wrong. The genesis of these technologies was in e-commerce, not publishing at all. The fact that these tools have done nothing to prevent the descent of CPM might be that publishers never saw their content as their merchandise. Instead they merchandised the blank slots with irrelevant ads that provided no value to their real customers, the visitors.

Re: Andre Agassi, Do What You Love, Bob Dylan

jonathanmendez — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 10:06:22 -0000

As Bruce goes on to say "this ain't no dream we're living through tonight. You want it, you take it, you pay the price."

Re: Training Wheels

jonathanmendez — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 11:47:54 -0000

Funny, I was just talking with someone (young) last night explaining web rings. I loved them too and once in a while a obscure google query can get you to the remains of one. I think in some ways they have never left the web, they just got serviced, but I suspect we'll see them rise again.

Re: The Fallacy Of Zero Sum Game Thinking

jonathanmendez — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 23:21:23 -0000

In the paid search marketplace that thinking was not only rational, it happened. Brands came in and the small companies that seeded the marketplace could not compete for the best placements on the best words. It would be interesting to see KS data as to avg contribution size and dollar scale in the name projects vs others. That might be a good way to foretell what will happen as more big names come into the kickstarter marketplace.

Re: Online Data: Cheap, Plentiful, Inaccurate

jonathanmendez — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 00:09:23 -0000

Jack - small correction - my original tweet said billions in revenues not millions.

https://twitter.com/jonatha...

There are companies doing millions in revenue off inaccurate data because as John alluded to most agencies don't care and brands have no way to validate it (which is why agencies don't care).