Mintigo: Big-Data Analysis For Customer Acquisition

I've made my career out of finding (in some cases stumbling upon) disruptive online technologies early in their lifecycle and evangelizing them into companies that usually see tremendous benefit. Netscape ('95-99), RealNames (early paid search company that first convinced Google to try our paid search ads in 2000), Efficient Frontier (#1 SEM platform, acquired by Adobe last year), Omniture (acquired by Adobe) and Dapper (dynamic display, acquired by Y! last year) are firms I helped customers profit from over the years.

After talking with dozens of startups over the past several months, I've settled on one as my next wild ride that has more positive disruptive potential than any other, one that if widely adopted will bring the type of macroeconomic boost I'll proudly bore my children with.

The company is Mintigo, and the pitch is both simple and elevator-ready:

Mintigo profiles B2B companies' existing customers across 1000's of semantic, tech, social and personnel indicators, crunches terabytes of web data to find all prospects matching that customer DNA, then delivers fresh, accurate, high-converting prospects into your CRM system.

Please take a look at the short videos below, and reach out to me at chris@mintigo.com if you'd like to discuss.

More to come as I get my head fully around this one...

Jeremy Lin: A Palo Alto Local Article Compendium

We Palo Altans have always had much to be proud of, whether in search engine marketing (Google's first office was above a yogurt shop on our main street), technology (Facebook, HP, Zerox, dozens of other majors) or music (The Grateful Dead, Joan Baez). But it is Jeremy Lin who most completely captures what is best about Palo Alto. So that people can get a better perspective on Linsanity's uniquely Palo Altan nature, I've put together a list of the most insightful locally-written articles, including several from Palo Alto High School's own publications. Of particular note is the first one ('Jeremy Lin: My Reflection On Our State Championship') which is to team sports what Rousseau's Confessions were to self-awareness; Enjoy!

1. *You will get chills* reading this Paly Campanile piece written by Lin himself, in which he reflects as wisely, humbly and truthfully upon the concept of 'team' as has ever been done.

2. MaxPreps article (includes many photos of their state championship game in 2006)

3. SJ Mercury article on Lin Palo Alto memorabilia - including his JLS jr hs yearbook - going on eBay for Linsane prices

4. Article from the Paly Voice, w/reactions from Paly students. Great photo of him after winning state championship

5. JLin Palo Alto HS photo gallery

6. JLin PAHS photo gallery #2 (SJ Merc)

If The Digital Ad Ecosystem Were The Stock Market

My blog readers are mostly either online advertisers, ad agencies and technology firms on the one hand, or investors (angels, VC's, institutional investors and sell-side analysts) on the other. Fitting, then, that I show you this infographic
from competitive ad targeting startup Pretarget comparing the online advertising ecosystem to that of the stock market. Much has been said about how marketing is becoming math and marketers are looking more like quant hedge fund geeks every day, but this is the most detailed mapping of that meme I've seen yet.


Pretarget deserves a look, by the way, for all you sales managers who, like Omniture back in the hey-day of the analytics wars, believed in going after the competition's customers.

SearchQuant: Starting Coverage on LinkedIn Ads

If you're in online marketing and have a B2B focus, exploring LinkedIn is probably on your To-Do list. Most of LinkedIn's revenue still comes from job listings and premium subscriptions (~40% & 27%, respectively, Quora Q&A here), so it safe to say their 135M+ members and 4B searches per year are one of, if not the biggest aggregations of B2B search activity anywhere, and are currently under-monetized, right?

Perhaps not. As I found out while trying to running a campaign targeting Apple employees, LinkedIn CPCs are crazy high ($3.50 in my case). Others are reporting similarly high CPCs, including Dave Eisenberg of super-sophisticated targeting firm TellApart, who saw $5-20 CPCs on B2B & B2C campaigns he ran recently. The shockingly high CPC anecdote list continues:

1. 5X higher CPCs than AdWords for a side-by-side B2B campaign (S. Katharaman in India, 1/22/12);
2. $4.94 recommended CPC for a B2B campaign (5/31/11)
3. $1.76 CPC for a B2B software campaign (2/23/11)
4. $2.25 CPC for B2C campaign for high-end tree houses (3/5/11)
5. $3-3.50 for specialist electronics (10/7/11)

Some of the anecdotes have happy endings due to very high B2B AOVs, but most seem to be wondering why the floor at LinkedIn is higher than some ceilings.