Yahoo cranks the amp with new ad system
The widely anticipated system, known as AMP!, aims to simplify the process of buying and selling online ads for advertisers, ad agencies, fast-growing ad trading networks and website publishers.
The ad management system seeks to capitalise on Yahoos strength as a website publisher that reaches 500 million web users monthly and recent efforts to sell ads off of Yahoo through major partnerships or specialized ad-sales networks.
The planned advertising system, formerly code-named Apex, is the lynchpin of the companys strategy to reach outside its own base of users and increase its position as the must buy location for online advertisers.
While the strategy remains in its early stages, AMP! is one of the products which Yahoo management believes will help propel the web pioneers next wave of growth. It is also one factor behind Yahoos reluctance to accept Microsofts unsolicited takeover bid currently valued at $US42.4 billion, which executives believe undervalues the companys assets.
This is really about creating a massively networking advertising ecosystem, Yahoo advertising executive Mike Walrath said in an interview. Walrath founded Right Media, an ad sales exchange, in 2003 and sold it to Yahoo last year.
AMP! will be introduced in stages starting in the third quarter of this year, Yahoo said. It aims to give individual sites the capacity to sell ads across the web, replacing single-site systems that still use email and even faxes.
The move also is a response to major competitors Google and Microsoft, which have each acquired major competitors in the market for sales of online display ads used by corporate brand marketers. Google closed its $US3.4 billion acquisition of ad sales management firm DoubleClick last month. Microsoft paid $US6 billion for aQuantive last May.
AMP! is a suite of tools that offers precise geographic, demographic, and interest-based targeting across a vast network of Yahoo sites and ad sales deals Yahoo has struck with more than 600 newspapers, Comcast and eBay.
It also includes niche websites such as WebMD, Forbes, the major ad networks, and thousands of smaller sites on the web.
In its initial stages, AMP! is designed to expand the reach of dedicated sales forces at newspapers or sites such as WebMD to allow them to reach many times larger audiences outside of their own sites, where they can cross-sell their advertising.
