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At the most abstract level, your organization is a single entity. At the most detailed level, each of your customers is an individual, unique and special. Perhaps the greatest challenge in marketing is reconciling these two forces: the unity of your brand and the individuality of your audience. You want to speak to people as […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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