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I believe that marketing — as a function, a profession, and an industry — is experiencing transformational changes and disruptive innovation, driven by the evolving capabilities and culture of the Internet and a new generation of marketing technology software. It is becoming more distributed in execution, more personalized in communications, and more fluid across boundaries inside and outside the firm. Its cycle speed is accelerating, its tactical building blocks are fragmenting — from a few …

Reflections on marketing technology for a New Year Continue Reading »

Read a great article on how to avoid contextual tragedies by J. Brooke Aker, the CEO of the US subsidiary of semantic technology firm Expert System. The article discusses the promise of semantic advertising (in particular, the kind that is better at figuring out what a page really means when deciding which ads to place on it). To make his case, Aker shows a number of examples where plain old keyword-based contextual advertising went astray. …

Semantic advertising to avoid contextual tragedies Continue Reading »

A reader recently commented on my semantic advertising post with a great question: exactly how well does semantic advertising do compared with plain old contextual advertising? Can the difference be quantified in a way that’s independently verifiable? It should be. I understand why it’s not today. There are hundreds of advertising networks, each with their own techniques for targeting and placement, locked in frenzied competition in a young market with few barriers to entry, a …

Semantic advertising contextual corpus Continue Reading »

Nice article in AdAge Digital by Marta Strickland of Organic (and editor-in-chief of the wonderful blog ThreeMinds): What the Semantic Web — or Web 3.0 — Can Do for Marketers. Marta does an excellent job summarizing some of the benefits semantic web technologies can have for marketers. Certainly this includes semantic advertising, such as better contextual advertising (e.g., Peer39) and dynamic content in ads (e.g., Dapper MashupAds). But she also draws connections between semantic technologies …

Semantic marketing gains mainstream attention: article in Advertising Age Continue Reading »

Earlier this month, Dr. Riza C. Berkan, the CEO of semantic search engine Hakia, wrote a great article on iMedia Connection, Why semantics are the future of paid search. In my post on the different kinds of semantic advertising, I mentioned that “advertisers in semantic search may ultimately end up bidding on concepts and relationships rather than keywords or phrases”. Dr. Berkan makes a compelling argument for why that could be a huge boon for …

Semantic advertising to make the Long Tail manageable Continue Reading »

Are the creative capabilities of major advertising agencies really being disrupted by online marketing? Here’s one theory. Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and author of bestselling books such as The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, has a model for disruptive innovation. As a particular type of product or service improves over time, its “performance” — i.e., how powerful it is along a certain dimension of capability that buyers care about — eventually overshoots …

Disruptive innovation in online advertising Continue Reading »

What do you get when you cross Ph.D.’s in marketing with Ph.D.’s in computer science? Hopefully a $50,000 grant from Google and WPP. The two companies recently announced the Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program to fund academic research in the following topics of interest: online and offline media interaction relevance and effectiveness measurement audience types and engagement Research questions to be studied might include: How does offline media affect search and vice versa? …

Google and WPP marketing research awards Continue Reading »

Last week, I commented on a post about the Web 3.0 Manifesto Published on ReadWriteWeb. Richard MacManus offered three free tickets to the Defrag Conference 2008 for commenters suggesting the best “web 3.0” apps. Incentives are good (more on that shortly), but it’s an irresistible topic to me regardless of a contest. I have to admit, I was tempted to make a snarky remark such as the Semantic App Generation Algorithm: pick any noun; put …

Marketing incentives for semantic web adoption Continue Reading »

In my previous post, I gave a hypothetical example of how OpenCalais — the web service offered by Thompson Reuters that automatically annotates semantic metadata for regular HTML pages — might incorporate a kind of semantic advertising. However, unless you’ve personally integrated OpenCalais into your site or blog, it might have been a bit hard to visualize what exactly that semantic metadata could be. Sounds very geeky and abstract, and might leave the marketer in …

Semantic data in your web site now Continue Reading »

Just read a fascinating article on ReadWriteWeb, Will the Semantic Web Have a Gender?, that perfectly illustrates the challenges of semantic branding. The article summarizes arguments made by Corinna Bath, a researcher who studies gender and technology, in a recent interview. She makes a case that the semantic web may develop a gender bias because the categories of relationships that are becoming standardized — e.g., the Dublin Core ontology — subconsciously reflect the worldview of …

Semantic branding and gender politics Continue Reading »