We went from 8-tracks to iPods, snail mail to email, the VCR to the DVR. These are just a few examples of industries that have been completely changed by innovation. History clearly shows that inefficient marketplaces are ripe for transformation. And that’s what we’re focused on here at Yahoo!. We plan to forever change the way advertisers, publishers, agencies, and ad networks interact with one another in order to serve ads that are relevant and effective.

We’re popping the hood today on a new advertising management platform, AMP! from Yahoo! (you might have seen it referred to as Project Apex). It’s been under development for some time now by an army of engineers, product strategists and managers, and user-interface design experts — all intimately familiar with the online advertising industry. They understand the pain the industry currently feels in how things are done.

Here’s the core premise that’s fueled this new platform: Online advertising is growing increasingly sophisticated, yet it’s unnecessarily Byzantine to buy and sell. The online media landscape is incredibly fragmented. And, today, the process of finding your target audience, booking inventory, negotiating pricing, seeking approval, creating tearsheets, testing ads — it’s living in an 8-track world. Let’s just say people are doing a lot more faxing and phone calling than should be necessary in 2008. It’s terribly inefficient.

AMP! will not only automate all of these processes and take the cycle time down from weeks to minutes, it will enable a new, more open paradigm, taking participants from private walled gardens to a new world where they will be able to buy and sell across the entire Web – all in one interface, with a few clicks of a mouse. It’s like a stock market for ads — the more efficient the marketplace, the more value in it. The impact is hard to overstate. This is simply not possible today and we think that’s really hobbling the industry’s ability to focus on what matters most — developing great creative and getting it front of the right person.

We recently previewed AMP! for our partners in the Newspaper Consortium and there were “ah ha!” moments visible across the room, with execs throwing out comments like “blown away,” “revolutionary,” and they even put “sexy” and “ad serving” in the same sentence.

AMP! from Yahoo! is real. We will start rolling the platform out in phases beginning next quarter, and will open it up for additional publishers as well as advertisers, agencies, and ad networks throughout the rest of 2008 and into next year. And you can see what the newspaper execs were so excited about by checking out this short video:

Sue Decker
President

Today, I joined Jerry on stage at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Annual Meeting where we sat down for a fireside chat with IAB President Randall Rothenberg to talk about the huge opportunity before us in online advertising. Jerry kicked off the morning and talked about just how far we’ve come since Yahoo! and the Internet advertising industry started 13 years ago. According to eMarketer, Internet advertising spending in the U.S. is expected to hit $50 billion by 2012, which if we all work collaboratively together as an industry and take the complexity out of doing business online - is absolutely achievable.

The challenge is that advertisers and publishers are forced to deal with disparate systems and multiple platforms for buying search, display, video, and local ads. That in itself is an inhibitor to achieving that growth. And we’re trying to solve these headaches by taking a different approach.

As the largest publisher on the Web that also leads in display advertising, and holds a strong number two in search, we maintain one of the world’s largest advertising networks and operate the Right Media Exchange. We’re truly in the best position to understand the evolving needs and demands of the entire ecosystem.

And at Yahoo!, our goal is simple. We want to eliminate all the friction and complexity that advertisers, publishers, agencies, and exchanges deal with so they can focus on reaching the right audiences and driving greater monetization.

We’re building a cutting-edge platform that simplifies the process for advertisers when buying targeted, guaranteed and non-guaranteed advertising inventory across Yahoo!’s owned and operated network, partner sites, and other advertising networks. And furthermore, this new platform will be a web-based, hosted application that harnesses the power of collaboration across the Internet.

Our approach is as different to current advertising platforms as the DVR was to VCRs. We believe this to be a real game-changer.

The new platform will enable all participants in the ecosystem to benefit:

• Publishers will be able to better serve their advertisers’ needs by making it easy for publishers to sell, package, and distribute other publishers’ inventory alongside their own, giving advertisers extended reach to audiences across the Web through a centralized platform.
• Advertisers will be able to spend more time on driving revenue and developing compelling creative for their audiences, rather than dealing with the complexities of ad generation, assembly, trafficking, and serving ads.
• Advertising agencies will be able to streamline the buying process for multiple accounts across multiple publishers and allow for creative testing and campaign optimization, even as the campaign evolves.
• And last but not least Advertising Networks will benefit from having a platform that connects publishers to the best advertisers for their site and audience, and advertisers to the best publishers with the most relevant audiences, thereby increasing both their reach in the process.

We previewed this new platform for our partners in the Newspaper Consortium a couple of weeks ago, and were so pleased with their response that we decided to give the attendees at the IAB Annual Meeting a glimpse so they could share in our excitement. And since most of you weren’t there this morning, I wanted to tell you about the great stuff we’re working on at Yahoo!, so that you can get fired up with us as we set out to revolutionize the online advertising market once again.

Sue Decker
President

Photo from DougGoodman.com.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been a media junkie my whole life. Even though I spend the vast majority of my media time online these days (and oh, yes, my work time, too), I have always been a newspaper fanatic. I delivered the Rocky Mountain News as a kid and, even today, I rarely board a plane with less than three papers folded under my arm. There’s something about the portability and the discoverability of news in that format that’s always appealed to me and I continue to be fascinated by the amount of insight, aggregation, production and distribution that happens in a 24-hour period at newspaper operations around the country. While so many new media have emerged over the years — first radio, then television, and ultimately cable and the Internet — newspapers remain one of the best ways to find relevant information (news, sports, classified ads, events) about what’s happening in your own backyard.

Yahoo! is a growing force in local content, too. We’re seeing huge growth in all things local, including user reviews and ratings in Yahoo! Local, our online yellow page offerings, job listings in Yahoo! HotJobs, our great new Yahoo! Maps, access to local news and sports content right from our home page, and even through RSS feeds on My Yahoo!.

But we have a great opportunity to do more, now in concert with our new partners, a consortium of more than 150 U.S. newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Houston Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. Newspapers have always represented and connected local communities and their ability to bring physical communities online is a great complement to the virtual communities Yahoo! brings together.

What’s in it for you? We’ll have the opportunity to provide you with deeper, more relevant local content across our network from myriad sources, now including your local newspaper. If you’re a recruiter, you’ll have a one-stop shop that allows you to simultaneously place a job listing on your newspaper’s web site and on Yahoo! HotJobs. You’ll also enjoy state-of-the-­art recruiting tools and access to a larger pool of job seekers that you can more precisely target by location, industry, occupation or behavior. Similarly as a job seeker, you’ll have a larger pool of national and local jobs accessible in a searchable, easy-to-use format that will make it easier for you to find and apply for a job.

And if you advertise on Yahoo! or with any of our newspaper partners, we’ve created great new opportunities for you to reach the consumers you want through local, search or graphical advertising delivered in a more relevant, targeted way.

What’s in it for our newspaper partners? This partnership gives them the opportunity to get their content and help-wanted ads in front of millions more consumers than they can reach in their local markets, along with better search and other tools to improve the experience for online readers.

And for Yahoo!, we have the opportunity to do one of our favorite things — to better personalize your online experience and connect you to your passions and communities. I hope you enjoy the new features, as I will. But you’ll still find me carrying my newspapers with me wherever I go.

Sue Decker
Executive Vice President and CFO

Photo from thorii pablo