Blogs

I've been frustrated for a longtime by websites that continue to throw irrelevant ads at me in increasingly large quantities. It is well known that major media companies have been actively tracking and trying to make sense of user activity on their websites since the dawn of the Internet. So why am I rarely interested in the ads that I see? You'd think that all those PhDs in Silicon Valley would have figured me out by now, but as far as I'm concerned, they don't know me from Adam:) Yeah, I've heard that one too many times to count.

Last week I came up with what I think is a better way to deliver advertising, and for that matter content in general. I feel that it should be possible to select my areas of interest in a universal profile that I own and control, and have this little profile follow me around the Internet, so that websites can tailor their content and advertisements to me. That would make me really happy. I'd have a great browsing experience, advertisements would actually be informative, and I might even buy something based on those ads.

When I told my friend Eric about this concept last night he immediately gave it some more practical tech teeth by suggesting that I use microformats to create the universal profile. Then he introduced me to the Pinko Marketing discussion group and posted the idea there for discussion. I was surprised to see that 4 people already commented on Eric's post and gave him excellent suggestions and links. Thanks Pinkos! I've joined the fold, so you'll be hearing from me soon.

We're tentatively calling this microformat hInterest. There are a number of issues that need to be solved to make hInterest viable. Obviously, the biggest problem is getting the scale that will required to encourage large publishers and advertisers to adopt a standard format. At least one major player would have to adopt the format before it will be viable at all. With some work and industry backing, it should be possible to give users more relevant content, more control over their information, and a better online experience.

Jennifer Senior of NY Magazine wrote a great article on positive psychology and the study of happiness. My favorite part is the conclusion where Jennifer calls into question the goal of being happy, and gives strong support to the theory that depressives are the sane ones. After all, isn't the real goal to live a good life, not necessarily a happy one?

There is a well establish study showing that people who identify themselves as optimists tend to be mildly delusional:)

"One of the most interesting bits of American research to surface repeatedly in books about happiness is a study that shows depressives are far more likely to be realists, while happy people are more likely to walk around in a mild state of delusion. The study itself was fairly simple: A group of undergraduates was given varying degrees of control over turning on a green light. Some members of the group had perfect control; others had none the light went on and off of its own accord. The depressives accurately predicted, in each instance, whether they were in control of the situation or not. The nondepressives, on the other hand, thought they had control about 35 percent of the time over the situation in which they were, in fact, 100 percent helpless."

It's a fascinating finding with a hell of a lot of implications. New marketing campaigns for optimists, anyone? Check out the article for more details.

If you're a positive minded professional, who just wants the happiness action items, then read Happiness: A User's Manual.

I just had enough time to sign-up for AdCenter today and upload a few keywords. The interface for adding keywords is a little clunky. The dropdown menu on the keyword page upload page showed me gibberish instead of options. Once the keywords were added I had to click on 50 individual check boxes to chose phrase match, and I then I had to click on 50 individual checkboxes to deselect broad match. Yuck!

It seems that AdCenter also relies on a Yahoo like approval process rather than letting you edit ads on the fly. I'm still waiting for my ads to be approved and go active, so I'm not sure if AdCenter does Google like A-B testing to automatically figure out which ad is best and serve it more. I love that feature in AdWords!

The day parting and demographic targeting look great, but it is going to take a few days to see if these features work as advertised. Everything is on hold for now, because as of 9pm EST I got an error message that I could not log into AdCenter due to an "unspecified data error." At 10pm EST I got a message that AdCenter had "no record of my user name." I double checked and it was definitely my user name. Hmm... not very promising, but I'll try again tomorrow.

Google search and the Adwords management system may have revolutionized search advertising, but many of the functions of Adwords are still fairly primitive and some simple but essential tools are infinitely helpful in managing your Adwords account.

Here is one tool that any Adwords advertiser should have. And now, without further adieu I present the Adwords Search Term Formatter!

With great effort and struggle I have created an Excel spreadsheet that wraps long lists of search terms in quotes and brackets. As you probably know, without the quotes and brackets Google will apply broad matching to your search terms and you will burn through your ad budget in the blink of an eye. Happy formatting!