Yahoo launches 'stock market for ads'

Yahoo on Monday unveiled AMP!, an advertising management platform designed to "significantly simplify the process of buying and selling ads online." In its video demo, Yahoo refers to AMP as a stock market for ads.

File this platform under Yahoo's plan to be a central partner to everybody strategy. In a statement, Yahoo, which prebriefed the New York Times, said AMP is an:

"Integrated, web-based solution that allows unprecedented ease of cross-selling across a large ecosystem of buyers and sellers. It will allow advertisers to precisely yet easily target audiences while enabling publishers to better monetize their content."

In a nutshell, AMP will allow partners to buy search, display, local, mobile and video inventory from one interface. This all sounds Google-dashboard-ish doesn't it? One key difference is that Yahoo is leveraging its newspaper partnership to compile inventory and target regions and demographics. It has 600 newspaper publishers signed up for AMP. Yahoo said it will be opened up to partners, agencies, ad networks and other small publishers.

The key takeaways:

• Advertisers can select audiences across multiple sites and networks, work in mass and niche campaigns and manage their online spend.
• Agencies can use AMP to target and buy media, connect AMP to their back office applications and examine data.
• Ad networks can bolster their supply across inventories and connect to AMP via APIs.
• Publishers can manage inventory and create private networks.

AMP, which used to be known as Project Apex, will roll out in phases in the third quarter. Others will be looped in through 2008 and 2009.