“You In?” program encourages acts of good during the holiday season

Bob Hope once said, “If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”

Truer words were seldom spoken. At Yahoo!, we strive not only to not be evil, we want to do a little good. That’s why, during this year’s season of sharing, we’ve launched the year-end giving campaign “You In?”.
The campaign, designed to send a cascade of kindness throughout the Yahooniverse and beyond, is an extension of our Yahoo! for Good Purple Acts of Kindness program, and aims to encourage you, the most valuable part of our global community of 600 million, to give back a little of your good fortune through random acts of kindness—and encourages others to do the same.

And without necessarily spending a dime.

Read the rest of this entry »

An Announcement from Right Media

Right Media will discontinue supporting the Direct Media Exchange (DMX)—our self-serve platform for small publishers looking to monetize their sites. The DMX site will serve ads through Jan. 31t and DMX participants can access their reports through March 1.

For more on this anncouncement, see the full post on the Right Media blog by Stephanie Dorman, Senior Director, Client Services and Operations.

—The Team

Tweet your fave raves for the past year with Yahoo!

By all accounts, 2009 was pretty rough year: economic meltdowns, persistent war, piracy on the high seas, fires and floods. You name it, we endured it.

But not all the news was bad. This year saw airline Captain “Sully” Sullenberger save the lives of 155 people by successfully ditching hos plane in the Hudson; a new world land speed record for a steam-powered car; America’s first commercial Zeppelin—yeah, you heard that right: Zeppelin—service took off into the wild blue yonder over the San Francisco Bay Area; NASA enjoyed a flawless Space Shuttle record and discovered water on the moon; the Large Hadron Collider set a world record in accelerating protons to near light speed and, here at Yahoo!, we announced a dazzling new brand relaunch that promises to be a boon for both our users and advertisers.

Yahoo!’s been crunching the Year in Review numbers since 2001. What we discovered in 2009 is that people all over are coping—and escaping, dealing with the big-footprint issues of the day while seeking comfort in what was good.

This year, you can share your own experience in 140 characters or fewer by Tweeting it on Yahoo’s 2009 Year in Review site, or view the 2009 Rewind video.

—The Team

Follow the bouncing user; tweeting for fun and profit; cheap marketing that breeds like bunnies; get your phone to yodel,  and more

What’s behind a high bounce rate?
Users “bounce”—that is, click away and say goodbye to your website—when they find your homepage less than interesting. Search Marketing Standard’s Rebecca Appleton gives four reasons why users bounce and tells you what you can do about it. She’s also kind enough to offer tips on how to optimize your landing page for PPC. All that for free. There’s a reason we like her.

Tweet all about it!
Unless you live in L.A. or have an expense account fat enough for your company to fly you there, you’re probably missing the 140 Character Conference (#140), yesterday and today. Well, never fear, Twitter is here. Follow the Tweets by conference-goers, including our own Jeff Sweat. Good stuff for the aspiring publisher to know. Read the rest of this entry »

Hacker. Computer jock. Key puncher. Geek. Code monkey.

Developers, in the words of the late, great Rodney Dangerfield,  ”get no respect.” Except here at Yahoo!

We celebrate the geek every year with Open Hack Day. This time, we did it in New York’s Times Square.  Hackers from all over gathered and submitted their best hacks  for fun and prizes over a 24-hour period.

For all the details, click over to Yodel Anecdotal. Or just watch the movie…

Yahoo! CMO Elisa Steele unveils new global marketing campaign

Yahoo! chief marketing officer Elisa Steele announced our largest branding campaign ever in an IAB Mixx keynote address, telling the Ad Week audience that our message to consumers is: It’s you.

“We’d like to provide consumers more of what they want, and less of what they don’t,” Elisa said. That means bring them the best of their worlds (their friends, families and interests) and the world (news, information, and entertainment).

Elisa pointed to recent launches of our front page, Mail, and mobile apps are good examples of how we’re bringing both together. “Everything needs to be grounded on this concept of personal relevance.”

In the keynote, Elisa unveiled a video and still images that will be part of a global campaign. “The Internet is under new management: Yours,” one ad said. She also played new versions of the Yahoo! yodel.

For more about the keynote and the branding campaign, check back here later today.

For more details on the new Yahoo! branding campaign,  see Elisa’s post on Yodel Anecdotal.

— The Team

Cars.com and Yahoo! help advertisers reach car buyers in more places

Online car shopping site Cars.com wanted to help automobile manufacturer advertisers extend their reach to target users shopping for specific cars beyond Cars.com—and found a way to increase clicks by letting advertisers target potential customers on Yahoo! pages, too. 

About Cars.com
Cars.com, a division of Classified Ventures, LLC, offers online ad solutions for automakers, dealers and private-party sellers in the form of classified advertising solutions, banner advertisements and lead-generation.

The problem
Cars.com wanted to offer its advertisers more frequency—and more inventory to choose from—but wanted a high-quality source that its advertisers could trust. An automobile purchase is a high-ticket, considered decision, and the traditional consumer shopping behavior is changing due to the economy. The time horizon has extended, as shoppers consider switching to a new vehicle category, and shoppers are more likely to visit multiple dealerships before locking in their decision on a make or model. So insulating the buyer experience from other manufacturers is now even more important to a manufacturer than ever before, no matter where they go online.

“We are a pure-play automotive site with comprehensive new and used car inventory, as well as editorial content that assists car shoppers in making an informed purchase,” says Joan Ritter, Director of Advertising Marketing Development at Cars.com.  “What this means is that the only reason someone goes to Cars.com is because they are in car-shopping mode—whether early on or late in the decision process. It’s extremely efficient in delivering a car-shopping audience.” What Cars.com needed was a re-targeting solution that would help it extend its capability to other inventory.

The solution
Cars.com formed a partnership with Yahoo! that lets it sell Yahoo! non-guaranteed inventory to its advertisers. “We were attracted to the Yahoo! name, as well as the fact that our clients didn’t view Yahoo! as an ad network,” says Karen Kurtz, Advertising Product Manager of Cars.com. Advertisers felt that Yahoo! would place their ads on higher-quality inventory than ad networks would, giving them advertisers more impressions and more control of their images. 

In addition, Cars.com can tag a user, including the type of car they were investigating and the regions they live in, and run ads for relevant cars when those users visit pages on the Yahoo! site. “On Yahoo!, we get an extra boost,” Kurtz says. “They may not be looking for a car at the moment, but we can serve them a brand reminder after their visit to Cars.com. Because the ad placement on the Yahoo! network is no longer on an in-market site, it is interruptive, and therefore click-through behavior can be impressive. For those manufacturers who make clicks to their own site an objective, this can be very valuable.”

The results
The Yahoo! partnership has dramatically increased the amount of impressions that Cars.com can offer to its advertisers. That, in turn, gives them more opportunities to reach users. “Yahoo! has 30 to 100 times the inventory that we do,” Kurtz says. “We can present it to advertisers as an upsell to help them extend their brand.”

Cars.com says that the partnership and its retargeting capabilities has made it simpler for advertisers to get their ads in front of the right kind of customers. Automobile companies can buy Yahoo! ads for users who checked out competing cars, a practice called “conquesting” that Cars.com typically doesn’t allow on its own site.

Says Ritter: “We consider the Cars.com Yahoo! re-targeting buy to be the ultimate one-two punch solution for both local dealerships, as well as for manufacturers. It marries the Cars.com quality audience to the Yahoo! distribution network. And our advertisers and agencies are excited about the ability to get such a powerful ad buy in one fell swoop.”

— The Team

Yahoo! talks to publishers about managing multiple sales channels

Yahoo!’s Professional Services team is everywhere these days. Last week we blogged about several events Yahoo! would be participating in, an IAB Professional Development class about Managing Multiple Sales Channels being one of them. The class, led by Marc Grabowski, senior director of network sales, and Jeanne Hwang, director of consulting, helped publishers and networks set up their sales teams to develop ad packages that cross sales channels and maximize their inventory. Luckily for me the class was in San Francisco: No travel required!

Within the first few minutes we heard why attendees had given up three hours of their day to be there. The reasons the attendees gave ranged from getting a handle on yield management to developing streams of new ad revenue to dealing with channel conflict. With this industry changing as quickly as it is, I understood where these people were coming from. Luckily, Jeanne and Marc had a few tricks up their sleeves to deal with these issues. The three biggest takeaways were:

Times, they are a changin’
The industry is undergoing a dramatic shift. Marketers are becoming savvier; they have fewer ad dollars to spend but have more metrics at their fingers than ever before, and they want results. Over the last few years we’ve seen a shift in ad dollars from brand to performance. Roll in agencies’ demand for more transparency, and you can see how this is causing a pain point that publishers and networks must address. Bottom line:Publishers and networks must become savvy sellers of performance advertising.

Just say no
Successful sales teams work with marketers to identify the goals of a campaign but, more importantly, they help determine if the campaign is likely to see success on their site or network.  Is the marketer looking for clicks or conversions, and what are those worth? Who is their target audience?Does the creative have a clear call to action?Is the conversion path short?Does it require minimal registration information that is easily provided (Such as a zip code as opposed to a social security number)?Bottom line:If the answers to the previous questions point to a bad campaign, sales teams must learn to just say no.

Differentiate to survive
How do you avoid conflict among channels that are selling the exact same inventory?You don’t—it’s inevitable. If marketers are able to access the same inventory from multiple sales outlets, they can take the lowest price, ultimately degrading the value of your inventory. You can fight slipping CPMs by allowing different channels to sell different slices of inventory determined by targeting, frequencies, properties, and so on.  Bottom line:Differentiate what sales channels are able to sell to help avoid conflict.  

—Megan Bergtholdt, Engagement Manager

Yahoo!’s Bill Wise talks trash, tackles publishing problems at Digiday

You know it’s a great panel when quips are tweeted:

Yahoo!’s Bill Wise: “I’m smarter than you.”
Time Inc. Media Group’s Kirk McDonald: “You work for Yahoo—how could you be?”

The ribbing was all in good fun, livening up Bill and Kirk’s panel at the Digiday targeting conference’s  ”The Publisher Roundtable.” But Bill, our GM of Global Exchanges, got the last laugh when the audience caught Kirk apparently stretching his experience in the industry by checking his LinkedIn profile.

In addition to providing a ton of laughs, the conference also tackled some big questions around the industry’s use of data and where the market is moving.

What data is a proxy to valuable customers?
There was no argument that the industry felt that they need to use data to enable accuracy, efficiency and scale. There was also no argument that this is HARD! (Well, duh.) Making data actionable and figuring out which data to use is why hundreds of networks and service providers specialize in only this.

What I didn’t hear enough of was taking into account the consumer consideration cycle and user intent. One panelist did make a great analogy: If there is a 25+ male, high-income, investor on a slide with his kids on a playground, you probably don’t want to choose that time to talk to him about 401ks. The same thing goes for online advertising: you want to target him with a 401k ad when he is in research mode.

Where do we need to go?
What was clear throughout all the panels is that everyone is an intermediary— networks, agencies, and publishers. Networks and publishers increasingly offer agency-like services: Time discussed its branded network, and one of White Pages’ core service offerings is behavioral targeting. We are entering a world of “co-opetition.” Publishers need to focus on syndication to aggregate similar individuals and will likely start selling audiences rather than placements.

—Megan Pagliuca, Director of Consulting, Professional Services

Yahoo! at OMMA Publish, IAB events

Are you trying to capture more ad dollars? Juggle multiple sales channels? If you’re like most publishers, those questions aren’t far from your mind. Fortunately, the answers aren’t either—especially if you can make it to one of the events Yahoo! is participating in next week in New York and San Francisco.

Yahoo! will be taking opportunities at OMMA Publish, a one-day event on June 17 for publishers In New York, to discuss the challenges faced by the publishing industry—and some of the solutions. Jacob Ross, director of partner professional services, will speak on a panel, “Can Technology Save Publishing?” (We haven’t seen the panel yet, but we assume their answer is “Yes.”) Jacob, along with publishers and representatives from technology companies, will help publishers sort through the ad networks, distribution platforms, site optimization tools, and social media options available to them now. The panel also asks whether technology is becoming more critical than content itself.

If you think you should be doing more with your inventory, you may want to check out Yahoo!’s lunch session, “Get the Most out of Your Inventory by Capturing Performance Ad Dollars.” In the session, Megan Pagliuca (Director of Consulting, Professional Services) and Shoen Yang (Agency Professional Services, Consulting) talk about how ad dollars are increasingly moving online and toward performance marketing instead of brand marketing. More importantly, they tell you how to understand your advertiser’s needs and set up your team to grab some of those dollars yourself.

On the opposite coast, and a day earlier, Yahoo! will share its thoughts on managing multiple sales channels at an IAB Professional Development Class in San Francisco. The class, led by Marc Grabowski, senior director of network sales, and Jeanne Hwang, director of consulting, helps publishers set up their sales teams to develop ad packages that cross sales channels and maximize their inventory. One of the strategies they will discuss is treating non-premium inventory as non-guaranteed inventory that can be sold to performance advertisers, rather than simply as your remnants.

If you’ll be in either of these cities, check us out. If you’re not, hey—we’re no more than half a continent away.

—The Team