It’s APT to change

Posted September 24th, 2008 at 10:33 am by Jerry Yang, CEO & Chief Yahoo

 11 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Don Draper of “Mad Men” would’ve loved advertising in 2009. Sure, he’d have to head out to the sidewalk with his Lucky Strikes and he wouldn’t have gotten away with philandering quite so easily, but he would’ve loved the opportunities that the digital age offers. He was a guy who knew how to connect — whether it was with a prospective client, a new hire, or a bottle of Scotch. And what we have in store for advertisers and publishers ushers the notion of “connect” into a new era.

Don, aka Jon Hamm, joined me, President Sue Decker, and our US Region Head Hilary Schneider on stage at Advertising Week in NYC today to help unveil APT from Yahoo!, our new advertising platform (which was formerly known as AMP from Yahoo! or Project Apex). Jon helped us put our platform in context with the evolution of advertising over the last 40 years – from the time when the advertiser was the indisputable king, to today, when the consumer is clearly in charge.

I started dreaming about this day 18 months ago, when I laid out my vision for our board of directors on how Yahoo! could play a unique role in changing the face of online advertising. In fact, Sue and I called it Nirvana at the time – a platform that would be to 2009 what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965, and the Internet to 1993.

Sounds like hype, right? We don’t think so. As Sue posted in April, we listened to all of the pain points that our partners shared about the process of buying and selling ads. Would you believe it takes more than 30 manual operational steps to move from ad strategy concept to launching that ad? It involves faxes (!!) and sometimes weeks in proposal processing. Audiences are now distributed across a sea of web sites and are harder to find, understand, and put a value on. Madison Avenue might think it’s a shame Johnny Walker Red doesn’t flow at the office anymore.

APT looks to change all that. It’s simple. It’s open. It’s fast (like minutes vs. days). It provides a new level of control. It offers cross-selling more easily than ever been before. It will provide large amounts of quality inventory. It will help advertisers customize and target their messages more precisely through advanced targeting. And it will drive results. All this from a single online application. No more cobbled together processes or impressions. No more wasted time.

Our confidence in APT’s ability to transform the marketplace isn’t based on theory or conjecture. It’s because of the feedback we’ve been hearing from partners who have been working with us side-by-side as we developed and then began testing the platform. In fact, William Dean Singleton, CEO of Media News Group (parent company of the San Jose Mercury News), also joined us on stage today, using words like “extraordinary and “sea-change” to describe how APT will take MNG into the future.

APT is real today and we’re starting to roll it out to our Newspaper Consortium members, which will continue for the remainder of this year and into the next. They’ll be followed by other publishers, advertisers, agencies and ad networks beginning in 2009.

If only Sterling Cooper could be here to reap the benefits.

Jerry Yang
Chief Yahoo and CEO

Tagged: jerry yang, newspaper consortium, online advertising, sue decker

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11 Comments Add your own

News | September 24th, 2008 at 11:43 am

So it comes next year only?

Tim | September 24th, 2008 at 11:52 am

Sounds very interesting – look forward to learning more and playing around once live…

My question is if it will have any impact on Y! Search Marketing at all?

Dave | September 24th, 2008 at 3:54 pm

Somehow Yahoo always announces products before they launch.

Coming in 2009 – but let’s hype it today. Where is the Beta version?

Nicki Dugan | September 25th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

@News & @Dave: Actually the platform is live today. This is not a beta. We’ve started with the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. Working with the Newspaper Consortium, we’ll systematically integrate hundreds of our newspaper partners over the next few months and into 2009. We’ll start to make the platform available to publishers by the end of 2008 and to advertisers, networks and agencies in 2009.

@Tim: The platform will evolve over time, and we intend to integrate all of the different existing ad platforms into APT.

Gordon Choi | September 25th, 2008 at 11:30 pm

Hopefully Yahoo’s new platform will be the solution to the problems of the existing YSM platform and at the same time it will provide the edge to display ad advertising.

Юрист Петя | September 27th, 2008 at 5:28 pm

Good news!

leb0wski | October 16th, 2008 at 11:31 am

@Gordon: I agree. Hopefully Yahoo will build / transition the current YSM Panama platform into a new platform that actually feels like it was designed for the user instead of a platform that feels like it was designed by engineers with no grasp of how search marketers wish to manage their campaigns, who put bandaid after bandaid on the tool to make it pretty. I would love to send Yahoo more of my ad spend, but the current Panama UI is so difficult and frustrating to use I just can’t stand it, so I end up sending more of my $ to Google. You have an opportunity here Yahoo, please don’t screw it up.

Tom | October 16th, 2008 at 3:04 pm

I agree. I would spend more with YSM if the interface was better.

John John | January 15th, 2009 at 12:47 pm

For us to use this service, we’d need a list of current publishers in the network. So far, I have been unable to find such a list. Can anyone point me to it?

Thanks!

John John

Jacques Snyman | Website Design | April 20th, 2009 at 1:15 am

OK, so we’re a good few months into this. Any feedback on
how effective the new advertising platform has been so far? Some stats will make great reading! Thanks guys!

peter petterson | August 21st, 2009 at 6:46 pm

I seek an alternative to Google Adsense; yes I’m smallfry but there are millions of us sprats out there being encircled by “sharks”.