Blogs-design.com

Welcome to the first in a new series of interviews called “How I Work”. These interviews revolve around how thinkers and creators in the Web world design, code, and create. The goal is not to get into the specific nuances of their craft (as that information already exists online), but rather step back and learn a bit about their habits, philosophies, and workflow for producing great work.

Meet Doug Crockford

First up is Douglas Crockford who believes JavaScript might just be the most elegant language ever. Learn why he thinks you should study the history of computer science, the value of reading your code in front of other people, and that jQuery really is a good thing.

Douglas Crockford is known as The JavaScript Guy. He’s famous not only for his O’Reilly book JavaScript: The Good Parts but even more so as the visionary behind the JSON data format as well as the JSLint tool. He was featured in the book Coders at Work for his contributions and philosophies on what JavaScript got right, and what it didn’t.

As a native of Southern California, Doug has the build of a surfer; lean and tall with white hair and a beard. A veteran of Silicon Valley, he’s worked at Atari Labs, founded and worked at numerous software start-ups, was head of technology at Lucas Films and now has the enviable job of being a JavaScript evangelist at Yahoo!.

Image credits go to Eric Miraglia.

Self-taught (as many of the greats are), he says his goal is simply to get more people coding in JavaScript, or any language for that matter. While his day job may be as a JavaScript evangelist, speaking with Doug you get the sense he really is an evangelist for programming in general.

Below is a conversation that took place in Bozeman, Montana prior to a talk at Montana State University. Doug freely shared his thoughts on great programmers, user empathy, and how JSON restored his faith in humanity.

Why do you feel programmers should study the history of Computer Science?

Well, first semester of physics is a history class. You study Galileo and Newton and all their contributions to the field and that gives us the overall view of physics. It’s a really nice place to start.

I wish CS would do that. It doesn’t seem to have enough value in its history and it’s a really amazing history that’s completely neglected. It’s rarely that the best idea won. So, we’ve taken different paths over the years and maybe haven’t realized why.

Ironically, despite the rate of change in technology, we see in the story of software that it takes a generation to retire or die off before we have a critical mass of bright young minds to embrace new ideas.

I think if people were more aware of their history, they could see these patterns more easily.

What were the traits of the weak programmers you’ve seen over your career?

That’s an easy one—lack of curiosity. They were so satisfied with the work that they were doing was good enough (without an understanding of what ‘good’ was) that they didn’t push themselves.

I’m much more impressed with people that are always learning. The brilliant programmers I’ve been around are always learning.

You see so many people get into one language and spend their entire career in that language, and as a result aren’t that great as programmers.

Do you feel that the pain a programmer goes through in learning a language contributes to this unhealthy attachment to using only one language?

My advice to programmers to avoid this trap is to learn lots of different languages. We’re in sort of a language renaissance right now and there are a ton of brilliant languages to learn from.

To learn new languages takes nights and weekends outside of work, and that’s a commitment. The great programmers are the people that are constantly picking a project and diving into it, learning a language that way.

In Coders at Work, you stress the importance of doing code readings with teams. Why do you feel it’s important to present your code in front of other people?

Well, over the years I noticed that there are some terrific programmers out there that are completely content to sit in their cave all day long writing brilliant code. But they don’t interact much with their team, which means it’s a lost opportunity for mentoring other members.

As you know, a lot of coders aren’t the most socially adept animals either.

So, my idea with code reading sessions is to provide a forum where people can come together and read for each other to get them out of their caves. The masters read for the beginners, and vice versa, as a team-building exercise.

The trick for success is to set up rules ahead of time so that nobody is going to get spanked and everyone is respectful in their feedback. It has to be a good learning experience for everyone. You have to be careful with a dysfunctional team, because it can quickly tear apart the group. But I always call the game before it gets that far.

The rules are that it’s about improving the quality of the code that we’re all responsible for, improving the quality of our team, and improving our individual capabilities.

Some people see this as a terrible time sink. Yet, I’ve found by doing this exercise, bugs are caught way ahead of time and you can prevent a team member from going off the tracks. But again, that’s not the goal, it’s about team building.

Over time the masters help pull up the beginners and the overall output from the team gets better.

Are programmers getting better at user empathy?

The best experience I had with empathy was working in marketing support. There were times I would go out into the field and hold hands with the customers and see the consequences firsthand of some of the crap we were delivering to them.

I was shocked when I moved into systems programming and how the programmers actually held the customer in contempt.

I think every programmer should work in customer support for the product they’re delivering.

It’s another case of over-specialization. “I just write the code,” is the response you get and the programmers don’t see it as a chance to improve peoples’ lives.

How much of a language do you need to know?

Virtually every programming language is too big. Language standards have difficulty removing unnecessary features but as users we can choose not to use it.

I would say you can do 100% with knowing 50% of the language.

The language that taught me that lesson the most was JavaScript, because it has more bad parts than good parts. It gave me a very strong motivation for figuring out what are the good parts and what are the bad parts, and what the criteria is for deciding what’s in or out.

And the good parts are just so good. Be sure to watch Doug’s Google Tech talk titled “JavaScript: The Good Parts.”

What approaches would you say a master has versus a beginner?

When I was a journeyman, I was a maximilist. I tried to use the whole language. While I don’t know if I would call myself a master now, I’m certainly a minimalist. I’ve tried to get good at using as little of the language as possible.

I place a lot of value in simplicity and minimalism.

What are your thoughts on jQuery? Some JS enthusiasts feel like it’s letting people off the hook from truly learning JS.

There is some really clever stuff in jQuery and I think John Resig did some very good work there.

I do have a problem with anybody doing anything without understanding what they’re doing. I’m not going to fault jQuery for attracting those sorts of people.

But I do think there are some other AJAX libraries that maybe doing a better job that aren’t quite as accessible. However, I think there is a place for all of these things.

When you were developing JSON was it tough to pull back and not put too much into it?

My design criteria were three things: minimal, contextual, and a subset of JavaScript.

The last constraint was to keep us from going off the rails and inventing new stuff. We had to only use stuff that was in JavaScript, which meant that our unicode handling wasn’t quite right because JS isn’t quite right, which was disappointing. We don’t have proper support for dates because JS didn’t have it. But we can work around both of these.

But it also meant that when somebody proposed, “Hey we should do this crazy thing” we could be like “Nope”. So, we had a really easy criteria for stopping extra features from being added.

One interesting story about leaving things out: as we got closer to releasing JSON I decided to take out the ability to do comments. When translating JSON into other languages, often times the commenting piece was the most complicated part. By taking the commenting out we reduced the complexity of the parsers by half—everything else was just too simple.

One of the best features of JSON is that it’s stable. If your program works now, it will work forever, and that is an attractive thing.

I still get notes from people saying they’ve got great ideas for the next version. But there isn’t going to be a next version. I always say you’re free to invent a new standard and promote it as much as you like.

How did JSON get adopted?

You know, the adoption of JSON sort of restored my faith in humanity because it was a good idea that won out, only because it was a good idea.

It was a case where there were no slick marketing campaigns. In 2001, I started working on it as a way to tie the browsers to the server. At the time, everyone thought XML had to be used or they’d say “that’s a great idea but JSON isn’t a standard”. So, I bought json.org, made a logo, threw up a Web page and it sat out on the Web for three years.

In the meantime, AJAX happened and when it became the way for writing applications JSON was there. There was counter promotion from the XML community, of course.

But when I arrived at Yahoo! some kids at the company started thinking it was okay to start shipping JSON API’s through Web services. And developers found the apps got faster and were easier to write.

It sort of took off from there—no slick campaigns. So a good idea based on simplicity won out for once.

Watch Doug Crockford At Google Speaking On “JavaScript: The Good Parts”

In this presentation from Google Tech Talks, Doug goes over the ideas behind his landmark book, JavaScript: The Good Parts, and dives into the areas of what JavaScript got right and what it didn’t. Learn about the history and common roadblocks programmers run into when developing with this language.

Learn About The JSON Saga

In this video, Doug tells the interesting tale of how JSON was discovered, and sheds some light on how it became a major standard for describing data in an interesting turn of events.

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© Jacob Cook for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

This year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner was the most social ever, with more than 60,000 tweets being fired off about the event — affectionately referred to as “#nerdprom” by attendees and viewers.

Winning the award for most tweeted-about moment: comedian and television host Jimmy Kimmel, whose jabs about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’ weight netted 765 tweets per minute. His opening monologue generated 701.

“No matter what side of the fence you’re on, you have to admit [Michelle Obama] has done a lot of good work, she just wants us to be healthy, really is all,” said Kimmel. Mrs. Obama, I thank you for that. Look, it’s Chris Christie, get him!”

“Gov. Christie, I think you might be misunderstanding New Jersey’s slogan,” quipped Kimmel. “It’s not the Olive Garden state.”

The runner up? President Obama, whose jokes about Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin racked up some 686 tweets per minute.

The dinner is an annual event enjoyed by politicians, the inside-the-beltway press and celebrities. It’s a chance for Washington, D.C. to let its metaphorical hair down for an evening and have some fun — and it’s one of the president’s few opportunities to poke some fun at the expense of the press and his Republican rivals.

For more, check out this infographic, courtesy of Twitter’s @gov.

More About: Politics, US, Video, white houes

Posted by Erica McGillivray

Because we want to gather the best data from a wider sample set, we've extended the Industry Survey deadline until Friday, May 18th. Help your fellow online marketers and take the 2012 Industry Survey today.

We'd also like to thank our partners who believe in the importance of this survey, including Outspoken Media, Search Engine Land, Distilled, Hubspot, Search Engine Journal, Techipedia, AimClear, Blueglass, Marketing Pilgrim and Search Engine Watch.

 

 

All survey answers are anonymous, so your privacy will be protected. If you do enter the drawing, we will not share or abuse your email address. 

 

If you want to share out the survey via Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc., we'd be greatly appreciative.

 

 

Thank you so much. You're awesome!

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We’re excited to announce 3 upcoming Google Analytics User Conferences in Europe. The first will be in Brussels on May 3rd, the second will be in Stockholm on May 8th and the third will be in Barcelona on May 10th.

• Meet members of the Google Analytics team, experts, and other users like you
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Most business owners secretly wish they could grow and expand their venture. Whether it is a second location, hiring more employees or upgrading the computer systems, the need and desire to grow a small business into a larger, more profitable endeavor is often a scary step. Here are four of the most common situations that stymie growth in small businesses.

Fear of Debt
After the first harrowing months or years of launching a business and seeing the start-up costs slowly be repaid, many business owners balk at racking up more debt to expand. While this is a healthy attitude, it can stall the enterprise if taken to an extreme. To help yourself overcome anxiety, save for your business goals and only borrow as much as you need.

Taking out a fixed-rate small business loan with a set payment each month is often easier to budget than a fluctuating credit card payment, so consider the method of borrow as well as the amount. Consult a financial planner if you are still uneasy about borrowing.

Unclear Goals
If you aren’t sure what aspect of your business needs to grow next, you may stall and do nothing. Not only is this nonproductive, but can harm your profits. For those who need help with planning the next step in business expansion, hiring a consultant for opinions and help formulating a logical process is an excellent idea. Once you are confident and focused, your business is them free to grow larger at the pace you have planned.

Staffing Issues
A second location, new department or expanded hours of operation may make it necessary to hire more staff. Anyone who has made a poor hiring decision in the past may be hesitant to try again. This is especially true if weeks of interviews produces no one who in the right fit for your firm. If possible, consider engaging a staffing firm or temp service to help you find the perfect employee. While the cost may be slightly higher, you will be sent fully qualified personnel who, many times, have already completed a drug test and preliminary training in the required skill sets. Background checks are also not uncommon.

Lack of Exit Strategy
A small business that grows too rapidly may flounder at first, especially if the expansion is a new location or department that offers new services. It will take time for your clients and the community at large to notice the new features and use them. Sub-par profits are to be expected for the new addition at first. However, do not wait until you are standing in line to take out a payday advance to pull the plug. Have a clear exit strategy mapped out in case you need to bring the business back to its previous size.
Many small business owners want to have larger, more profitable enterprises. By understanding these four possible issues, planning ahead carefully and enlisting the right help, you can enlarge your business and increase your market share, visibility, and profits.

Starting a small business and keeping it afloat can be tough. Don’t let fears of failure stunt your business growth.

Related posts:

1. How To Finance The Growth Of A Small Business
2. Google Places For Small Businesses
3. How To Choose A Marketing Company For Small Businesses

How Can You Become A Better Influencer? Tip: You'll attract more bees with honey than you will with vinegar!

Last week Lee Odden shared a post  on attracting the attention of influencers online.  Whether we’re talking about influencers with mass appeal, or those that have a closer and more personal relationship with their followers, each person presents an opportunity to learn and grow.

That got me thinking, when it comes to the inner workings of an organization: what makes a good influencer, and would I consider myself an influencer at TopRank Online Marketing?  In my opinion, there are some key factors that make a good influencer.

• Building a strong relationship and trust with your peers is essential in influencing their decisions.
• Having a team centric attitude towards those that you work with (no man is an island).
• Presenting an attitude that says “I’m lucky to be here” vs. “the company is lucky to have me”.

There is a certain power that comes with having influence over your peers.  A power that should not under any circumstances be abused.  After all, what is power without trust?  The bigger question to ask is: why should you want to be an influencer?  There are many benefits to being an influential member of a team including flexibility, trust, decision making power, and proof of ability just to mention a few.  I would like to dive into some of the qualities that I think make a better influencer, as well as some signs that you may already be an influencer and didn’t even know it!

4 Tips for Becoming a Better Influencer

#1 Listen More Talk Less:  Think back to your “Sales 101” training, what is one of the most important rules that salespeople must always remember?  Don’t talk yourself out of the sale.  By listening to what your customers (or in this case peers) are really saying, you can  better formulate recommendations that will have the largest impact on both their perception of you as well as the project, situation, or problem at hand.

#2 Give Before You Get:  One thing that I have found is that you cannot automatically expect that your peers will want to help you.  I enjoy seeing the organization I work for from a variety of perspectives and not just my own.  Being aware of when your peers may be struggling or need help is the perfect opportunity to offer your help.  Offering assistance on a fairly consistent basis will show that you are invested in making each person on your team successful, and are not simply looking to pull ahead of the pack. This will in turn increase your team’s willingness to help when you’re in a bind.

#3 Work Outside Your Comfort Zone: As online marketers our industry evolving at a rapid pace.  What was best practices when you go to sleep, may be vastly different than when you wake up the next morning.  There will always be tactics that you don’t know but  by charging full ahead and working on projects or platforms that are outside of your standard comfort zone you will increase your adaptability and ability to think on your feet. Adaptability and quick problem solving will increase perception that you are an innovator within the organization.

#4 Suggest Collaboration: I’m sure you’ve heard the saying: “two heads or better than one” well imagine what you could do when your whole team puts their brains together.  When we come up with ideas on our own without collaborating it’s easy to self validate concepts and consider only one point of view on the subject.  By creating an open brainstorming you will give your fellow team members an opportunity to share their opinions and feel that they have an impact on the end product, recommendation, or solution.  What you will end up with will most likely be a better version of what team members would have come up with individually.

4 Signs That You’re An Influencer & Didn’t Know It

While many of us may be working on becoming a bigger asset or a bigger influencer within our organization there are many people who are influencers, but don’t know it.  What are some signs that you may be more influential than you think?

• When your company is making new hires they ask if there is anyone you know that might be a good fit for the organization.
• You’re asked to work on projects or tasks that are outside of your job description.  Proof that you are adaptable and can work freely.
• Team members come right out and ask what you think they should do as it relates to one of their clients or customers.
• You’ve formed a meaningful and unique relationship with each member of your team, which shows that you are interested in them as an individual.

Truth Be Told: I shared what being an influencer means to me but I’m curious to know what you think.  Do you thinking working towards influencing your team members is a self serving strategy, or will it help the greater good?  Is there anyone in your organization that you would like to nominate as an influencer?  Why would you nominate them?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
Want to Have a Larger Impact on Your Organization? 4 Tips for Becoming A Better Influencer | http://www.toprankblog.com

Posted by searchbrat

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

There has been a lot of great discussion about the term “inbound marketing” of late and exactly what is covered by that phrase. For the purposes of this case study we are using the hubspot definition of inbound and outbound marketing. The following is a case study of how we (Salesforce.com) used inbound marketing along with social advertising and great retargeting to grow both our traffic and leads in the UK. Whether you are in B2B or B2C marketing, this case study should be relevant to you and your markets.

The new B2B Purchase Journey

The online landscape for marketers is changing at a rapid pace. People don’t buy the way they used to. There is a new purchase journey with three key elements:

1. Search-initiated – Most people begin their research of a new product via search engines, 78% of Internet users conduct product research online (Source Pew Internet & American Life Project, May 2010)
    
2. Social-powered – The growth of social networks has meant we can now tap into our own external networks for recommendations. Twitter’s active user base alone generates 90 million tweets per day, with 24% of adults have posted comments or reviews online about the things they buy. We now have a lot of user-generated content to review before making a purchase decision.
    
3. Buyer controlled – People can now choose where and when to engage with your brand, plus what content they would like to consume. You have to produce marketing strategies they choose to engage with.

For B2B companies this means their sales people are being engaged a lot later on in the purchase cycle and presents marketing with an great opportunity to become an integral part of the overall sales process.

"Get Found"

Considering the above, we decided to run a pilot project in the UK around the concept of “Get Found” (coined by Brian Halligan of Hubspot). Our aim was to get found by the people who are actively looking for help with the kinds of issues we address. We would do this by harvesting our own expertise in content that helps our prospects do their jobs better.

Since the core mediums involved in this project were search, social and content, we needed to consider how these different tactics are starting to converge and try to hit our sweet spot.

To do this we needed to answer three key questions:

• What do our prospects care about?
• How can we harvest our expertise to help?
• How can we get this content to market now?

Our Answer – “Content Rich Microsite”

When discussing microsites, a lot of people probably conjure up images of those used in new product launches (they have a very short life span) or those used to build elaborate link schemes. Our solution was to build content-rich microsite filled with the kind of content our target market would value. One critical aspect of the project was the location of the site. If you look at the salesforce.com structure, you will notice we already have a lot of great blogs sitting on http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/. Since I am interested in EMEA and in particular the UK for this project, I wanted the site to sit within our UK folder, so it would benefit from all the inbound links and social shares generated. To build our micro-site strategy, we had to address six key points:

1. Personas:
Who would this site be for?

For me persona development is the foundation of any good inbound marketing strategy. I am a massive fan of persona development, from the usability and design of your site, to content development; they ensure you strategy stays on target. In fact one of the best link building posts I read last year involved a type of persona development. We ran an intensive persona workshop (with the help of iqcontent.com) that included people from marketing, sales and customer feedback. We came up with 5-6 profiles of users we were trying to reach.

We mapped these against different stages of the purchase cycle and segmented by company size. All of this would help us when it came to content strategy and promotion.

2. Theme:
What would be the overarching theme that would hold all of our content together?

We used our own Radian 6 our social media monitoring tool, analytics and feedback from personas to come up with “The Social-Powered Business”.

3. Topics:
How do we take that theme and break it down into specific topics we can generate content around?

For us, this was pretty easy; we looked at the areas of business where social media had the greatest impact (sales, customer service, collaboration and marketing). It’s also important that your topics and themes are aligned to your products (we are trying to generate leads after all).

4. Process:
Exactly where would this content come from and how would it be validated?

Getting people excited about the project is key. You need to have people who will help with content development, feedback and amends. We used our own collaboration tool Chatter to build an internal social network around the project that consisted of 56 people. All content development was driven through that group.

5. Resources:

Of course we needed to source budget and a team.

6. Metrics:
How would we measure success?

This is a really important part of establishing any successful strategy. Brand awareness is never a good enough metric, traffic; leads and pipeline are what count. We built a dashboard in omniture with all key business metrics to measure our project.

The Launch – #socialsuccess

In 12 weeks we managed to develop:

• Strategy
• Personas
• Website
• 32 pieces of content

and our #socialsuccess site was launched on January 3rd, 2012.

The following five items were important in terms of making the launch of the site a success.

1. Content Types

For launch we chose four different categories from which we could generate content:

1. Created: Original content that was created from scratch. These are obviously the most resource intensive. They included things like an eBook, infographics, articles and slideshares.
2. Curated: These are round-up style posts. Choosing a topic like social selling and pointing to the best resources from the web on this topic.
3. Collaborative: We choose some of the best thought leaders around our topics and reached out to see if they would contribute some content.
4. Legacy: One of the easiest ways companies can quickly scale their content for inbound marketing is to repurpose content they already have into different assets. For example, our Dreamforce event that runs in San Francisco has a huge amount of expert presentations that are recorded over three days and put onto Youtube. We simply took the best videos and turned them into articles.

2. Product Messaging

Remember this sort of content is not product centric. Best practice for this kind of content is to follow the 80/20 rule – 80% non product and 20% product, for launch we stuck to 90/10. Product references were used where they made sense, but only on a limited basis.

3. Promoting the site

If you build it, they probably won’t come unless you have an awesome promotion plan. Some of the things we did to promote the site were:

1. Facebook/Twitter: Of course, all our best content was shared via our own Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages
2. We took over the home page of our corporate site (www.salesforce.com/uk) to promote this new microsite
3. Expert advocates: We collaborated with 15 experts for launch, who were kind enough to share our content with their networks.
4. Email/Newsletter: We promoted the site launch to our UK email database and also created a newsletter called #socialsuccess Insider to keep connected with users who signed up via our eBook download.
5. Guest Blogging: We did some guest blogging on relevant sites to promote #socialsuccess
6. PR: We did some PR around some of the pieces we produced
7. Employees: We galvanized our internal employees to share with their external networks

4. Outbound Marketing

We supported all our inbound marketing with great outbound tactics:

1. Twitter: We ran sponsored tweets for our premium content (eBooks). We saw some really great CTR numbers for these. I highly recommend them.

2. LinkedIn Banner Ads: We ran some advertising on LinkedIn targeted at our core personas developed above (linkedIn has some great targeting options like target by job title). Again, we saw a far higher CTR from these ads (those offering content) over those just advertising a product.

3. Google Display Network: We are currently rolling out the same type of ads (those offering our premium content) on GDN.

5. Experts

Reaching out to thought leaders in your market is a great way to produce some highly valuable content. We were lucky enough to have some great experts involved in the initial content, who shared their expert advice with our audience and were kind enough to share our content with their own.

The Results

The project was launched officially on January 3rd, 2012 and we have seen some great results already. The feedback we have been getting back on our social channels around the content is great.

But we have also seen great results in terms of our business metrics (keep in mind we are in B2B):

• Traffic for January was up 80% YoY
• Traffic from social sites was up 2500 %
• We have over 6500 people signed up to our newsletter
• Our eBook has been downloaded over 10,000 times (generating 10,000 leads)

Our inbound marketing experiment has really shown us how impactful this stuff can be. We are currently working on similar sites in France, Germany and also new topics sites for EMEA.

So it’s Onwards and Upwards!!

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Please join us next Thursday for a webinar on marketing attribution featuring Bill Kee, our Product Manager for Attribution, and Stefan Tornquist, VP for Research at Econsultancy.

Stefan will talk about insights from the recent Attribution whitepaper by Econsultancy and Google Analytics, and Bill will discuss Google’s approach to attribution and some of the tools we offer, including Search Funnels in AdWords and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics. Plus, he’ll demo the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google Analytics Premium.

We’ll also provide a few tips for how to get started with attribution. This webinar will be the first in a series on attribution — so please stay tuned for future installments!

Date: Thursday, April 26
Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET
Click here to register

We hope you’ll be able to join the live webinar, but for those who can’t make it, we’ll be sharing a recording after the event.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Conversion and Attribution

In the 1950s, major brand marketers, like movie studios and consumer goods companies, embraced television, helping spark a multi-billion dollar industry—and the beginning of TV’s golden age.

One reason these brands invested in TV was the emergence of new measurement tools, like TV ratings and market research, that helped show which ads were reaching the right audiences and having a positive impact.

Measurability is already at the heart of digital advertising—every second, businesses rely on insights from products like Google Analytics and Google AdWords to help them grow.

But major brands are interested in things like “brand recall” (such as whether consumers remember the name of your cereal), and “brand favorability” (whether they think positively about it), rather than just clicks and online sales. The metrics that the online advertising industry uses today aren’t always equipped to tell that fuller story. Many brands scramble together metrics like clicks, ad impressions, and numerous tools and measurement solutions, trying to make sense of them and—some time later—acting upon the insights they can glean.

The lack of these actionable, truly useful metrics is a key reason that many major brands have been cautious in embracing digital advertising over the past decade, even as high-quality content and millions of users have moved online.

We think that a new generation of measurement solutions will help brands quantify the benefits of investing online and will help to fund the next generation of great online content and services.

Today at the Ad Age Digital Conference we’re introducing the Brand Activate initiative, a new effort to re-imagine online measurement for brand marketers and—crucially—to help brands turn measurement into action, immediately. We’re working with the industry and supporting the IAB’s Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) coalition on this project.

We believe that the industry’s significant investment in these areas can substantially grow the online advertising pie, help major brands invest for growth, and fund new digital content and services.

Read all the details about this initiative, and the first solutions (Active GRP and Active View) on our Agency blog.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising