Exec: Yahoo positioned for more efficient advertising buys
A Yahoo executive this afternoon spent some time talking about the ad business - specifically Yahoo's approach to advertising and how it's different from that of Google and Microsoft.
Joanne Bradford, a veteran media advertising executive who joined Yahoo in September as senior vice president of U.S. Revenue and Market Development, was speaking to attendees of the Credit Suisse First Boston conference. She touched on a number of topics, from consumer behavior to the way advertisers view demographics, audiences and metrics.
Yahoo, she said, is hardly just a search engine. It's a web property, a destination point on the Internet where people consistently go for the things that are important in their lives - stock charts, e-mail, sports scores, headlines and even some water cooler celebrity gossip. From an advertising perspective, she said Yahoo's offerings allows advertisers to customize their buy to reach specific people with specific interests at the time and place when they're most engaged. Financial services companies, for example, are more likely to bid competitively - or pay a premium - to guarantee a spot on the Yahoo Finance page when the markets close and people are seeking the day's final numbers.
What Yahoo is trying to do for advertisers is to give them packaged buys, a multi-pronged approach that helps them get the most for their money. For example, Yahoo creates ad packages that are built around demographically-charged events, such as back-to-school, the Super Bowl or Valentine's Day. The Oscars, for example, were once considered to be an entertainment event but Yahoo now looks at it as a news and fashion event, as well, and has re-crafted the ad bundles to better target those ads.
As for the competitive battle for those mighty ad dollars, she said Yahoo differentiates itself well. For example, Microsoft's new search engine, called Bing, is no Yahoo. Like Google.com, it's a search box that takes you to someone else's site as soon as you find what you came looking for.
During the Q&A session, Bradford fielded a question from a man who mentioned that he has a MyYahoo page that he checks daily. Her response was interesting: "You're never going away. We've got you." She's right. I also have a MyYahoo page and a Yahoo mail account, as well as Yahoo Messenger and a customized page within Yahoo Finance. I can't tell you the last time I hammered out a search query in Yahoo (that's what I use Google for). And even though I use Google's mail and calendar services, too, I still spend quite a bit of time on Yahoo everyday.
Yes, she's right. I am never going away. They do have me.
One other thing I found interesting. Trying to grab market share from TV isn't what keeps her awake at night, she said. If she could grab all of the market share that's being lost by newspapers, direct marketing and other advertising channels, she'd rest peacefully at night. In her opinion, when the dust settles, the last two standing media industries going after ad dollars will be television and online.
"i know from all the research I've done and the experiences I've had that there is no better or more powerful combination than TV and online," she said.