Yahoo Announces Overhaul of Ad-Tech Offerings

Published 1/15/2014

Author: Molly Soat
Author Biography
​Molly Soat is a staff writer for Marketing News and Marketing News Exclusives. E-mail her at msoat@ama.org.

Last week, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo Inc. announced that it’s shoring up its digital advertising offerings in an attempt to stay relevant in the increasingly cutthroat programmatic buying and ad-targeting space—and to keep pace with competitors like Google.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer laid out some of the changes to the company’s suite of advertising technologies during last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The changes include display, native and search advertising revamps: Right Media, its ad exchange platform acquired in 2005, will be rebranded as Yahoo Ad Exchange, and its audience-targeting platform, formerly called Genome, will become Yahoo Audience Ads. Yahoo’s newest product is an automated ad-buying tool called Yahoo Ad Manager that works in concert with all of Yahoo’s ad products.

Last July, during Yahoo’s second-quarter earnings call, Mayer said, “[Yahoo’s] display business has felt some negative impact particularly due to the shift around programmatic buying.” Yahoo Ad Manager will offer advertisers what Yahoo has not been able to offer them before, said Scott Burke, senior vice president of advertising technology at Yahoo, in an e-mail to Marketing News Exclusives. “With the new Yahoo Advertising, we are aligning all of our ad products and platforms under the Yahoo brand, making it simple and clear for our customers and partners. Advertisers will also be able to access our suite of native and display ad products through an integrated buying platform, Yahoo Ad Manager, with comprehensive analytics across formats, on desktop and mobile, and across Yahoo and third-party programmatic inventory. The Yahoo Ad Exchange is a new global ad marketplace that builds on the capabilities and scale of Right Media, with more advanced inventory and demand controls, payment clearing and flexible private marketplaces. The new Yahoo Audience Ads product enhances and extends the capabilities of Genome, with the added scale of programmatic buying. We will be retiring the Right Media and Genome brands.”

Yahoo has owned photo-sharing social site Flickr since 2005 and bought the popular design-focused blog forum Tumblr last May. The company now plans to incorporate more “native” advertising into each social site. “We have been hard at work reimagining Yahoo’s core businesses across search, communications, media and video—all powered by two powerful platforms, Flickr and Tumblr,” Mayer said in her CES keynote. Tumblr-sponsored posts will now leverage Yahoo’s technology for targeting and programmatic buying options, while the current format for Tumblr advertisements remains the same. “These ads now leverage Yahoo technology for enhanced targeting, including geography and gender, improved optimization and a new way to buy,” Burke said. “Additionally, advertisers pay only when readers engage with their ads.”

In the crowded, competitive landscape of ad publishers and programmatic buying platforms, Yahoo’s biggest advantage as an advertising partner is its depth and breadth of consumer data, according to Burke. “We offer agencies, brands and partners the flexibility to buy directly from us or programmatically, taking advantage of Yahoo’s rich data alongside their own data and third-party data. Our extensive analytical tools can provide insights into the daily digital habits of more than 800 million people globally.”