Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft today announced agreements to offer each other’s premium non-reserved online display inventory to their respective advertising customers.  By early 2012, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL expect to have the opportunity to access each other’s non-reserved inventory to achieve the benefits of scale and efficiency.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Microsoft and AOL and bring to market what we believe will be a more efficient, effective and more effortless way to access true premium inventory and formats,” says Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo! EVP of the Americas. “There has a been a significant shift in how inventory is bought and sold, and we’re now 100% focused on controlling our own destiny, working directly with marketers and agencies and driving better returns for our advertising partners.”

The announcement underscores Yahoo!’s commitment to growth and innovation in the performance display advertising space.

The partnership is not exclusive, and the three companies will continue to compete with each other. Agencies, advertisers and publishers will still be able to do business with the individual Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft ad networks.

By integrating one another’s real-time bidding (RTB) technologies to facilitate the availability of non-reserved inventory, by early 2012, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL expect to have the opportunity to access each other’s non-reserved inventory to achieve the benefits of scale and efficiency. The Microsoft Advertising Exchange and Yahoo’s! Right Media Exchange will initially serve as the two marketplaces from which the partners can procure this inventory for resale to advertisers and agencies. AOL may, at its discretion, opt to use its own exchange technology solution subsequent to the launch of the partnership.

The partnership is based on the premise of audience-based selling across a large number of sites and is not expected to affect direct sales made by each partner’s respective internal teams. In addition to the United States, Yahoo! and AOL will have an agreement that extends to Canada. Microsoft’s Canada business is not participating directly in the agreement.

— The Team

Today, we are excited to make the new Yahoo! Local available in limited beta. With rich hyper-local content, this new product provides people a truly personalized experience across desktop and mobile (currently available via the mobile web on iPhone and Android), enabling them to discover and contribute to the best local news, deals, and events nearby, all in one place.

Our goal with the new Yahoo! Local is to be the best place for people to find what’s happening in their neighborhoods, whether they’re at home or on the go.  As some of you may have noticed, we’re beta testing the experience in more than 30 neighborhoods and cities in the U.S., including San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Brooklyn, NY as well as Birmingham, Ferndale, and Royal Oak in Michigan. We did this so that we can evolve the product quickly and enhance it based on a cross-section of user feedback and insights. You can access the new experience from your desktop or mobile phone by visiting: http://beta.local.yahoo.com.

Giving You the Best Local News and Information

When it comes to the best local news and information, we’re delivering relevant hyper-local neighborhood and city content created by the community, local publishers, and Yahoo! editors.  We’re featuring content from the best local blogs and newspapers.  And through a completely open ecosystem, we’re making it possible for any local publisher to be part of the new Yahoo! Local. By leveraging the power of the Yahoo! Contributor Network, the entire community can participate and publish stories on topics that matter to them. Individuals and organizations can also add events that are relevant to the local community.

Saving Money in Your Area

We are also fulfilling our commitment to personal relevance by delivering the best locally relevant offers from nearby spas, restaurants, and retailers – helping you save some cash while you support local businesses. This new hyper-local experience integrates our recently launched Local Offers program to provide consumers quick, easy access to the widest selection of local deals and offers from partners such as Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, BloomSpot and more.

Convergence of Content and Advertising

There is a unique intersection between the content users find useful and what marketers want to advertise – especially in a local experience – and we recognize that. With the new Yahoo! Local we are fundamentally changing how users will interact with local content, including advertising. As we build out the experience, we’re exploring and experimenting with various advertising solutions that will enable our advertising partners to reach their target users.

What’s Under the Hood

Technology is at the heart of everything we do at Yahoo! This experience leverages our powerful geo-informatics and content enrichment platforms, including Where On Earth (WOE) and Placemaker, to identify and geo-tag every news story that appears on every page down to the neighborhood level.

During the coming weeks and months, you will see us continually improve and expand our new hyper-local product by rolling it out to more neighborhoods and cities and adding new features that will make this the best local starting point for our users.

Take the experience for a spin around the neighborhood and tell us what you think. Stay tuned for much more from the new Yahoo! Local.

Matt Idema

VP, Yahoo! Local

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and Yahoo! Sports is the #1 destination, reaching more than 20 million users each month-it makes perfect sense to team up with the world’s leading soccer star-David Beckham.  Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced David Beckham would be Yahoo!’s global football ambassador throughout the World Cup. Beckham will be featured in our marketing campaign, provide content for Yahoo!’s World Cup site, tweet and post Yahoo! content on his Facebook page, judge a World Cup Flickr photo contest and more.

And at the conclusion of the Tournament, Yahoo! will host a live global press conference/Q&A with David Beckham in London, which will allow fans from around the world to ask questions of the superstar!  Finally, for several months following World Cup he will be a featured analyst for Yahoo’s football coverage as the world makes the transition back to the regional leagues and competitions.

Yahoo!’s World Cup program is a true global, integrated marketing campaign. It includes live kickoff events in various cities around the world, fun ways to share with your own social networks, a cool online interactive global game to play and a chance to WIN the first-ever Yahoo! Sports Pass (the ultimate prize for sports fans!).

This month, we have also begun launching even more exciting elements of Yahoo!’s campaign.  Our campaign is digitally led with a huge focus on and off the Yahoo! network across all segments with, of course, online activation as one of the major drivers to show the power it has to drive business and build brands.  We will execute a dynamic takeover of the homepage on June 17th illustrating Yahoo! properties in a 3D experience–entertaining, engaging and inviting users to make the web their own with Yahoo!.

Our TV spots, developed for video use on the Web as well, hit screens this week on MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central.  The “Entertainment” spot was also featured on the Glee finale!  Our campaign is cohesive and impactful, communicating one idea-Yahoo! brings Your World together with The World.  We’re continuing to focus on driving deeper engagement through unique demonstrations and trials of our products.

On the cusp of the launching the next release of our campaign, our creative advertising agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has received some very special recognition in the industry. Not only have they been named “Agency of the Decade” by AdweekMedia, but recently, at the CLIO Conference Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein were honored with the CLIO Lifetime Achievement Awards, one of the most prestigious honors in advertising. It recognizes outstanding and ongoing contributions of individuals who lead the industry and gives public recognition of something that we already knew — that we’ve got some of the world’s most talented creative partners helping us continue to build the Yahoo! brand.

Here is a preview of the actual ads that you will start to see in major cities soon:

Look for lots more great stuff to come!

Elisa Steele, EVP & CMO, Yahoo!

Partnering TNS (Kantar Media), Nielsen and Synovate, Net Index 2010 sets Internet media currency for the coming year. The research offered strategic insights for industry decision makers and tapped into the massive Internet opportunities available in the country of study and throughout Southeast Asia.

Top line trends from the country studies were presented at the recent ad:Tech Media and Advertising industry conference held in Singapore on 3 June, where Yahoo! Southeast Asia hosted the launch of the Yahoo! Regional Net Index insights.

Highlights from the research were presented to gathered media, industry advertising executives, marketers and media planners from around the region.

Some key findings:

• Indonesia, the largest and fastest growing online market in Southeast Asia, has recorded a jump from 22% (2009) to 48% (2010)
• Internet cafés in Indonesia are gradually losing ground to Mobile as dominant Internet access point. A decline of 19% has been recorded in Internet access through cafes; 83% in 2009 to 64% in 2010
• In Vietnam, mobile Internet access is picking up fast, nearly doubling year-to-year, from 10% (2008) to 19% (2009). Popular activities are searching for information and listening to music
• User generated content and community building is driving this trend in some markets like Vietnam, where it occupies the largest share (47%) among social media activities.
• Search, in the Philippines has grown significantly from 58% to 76% to become the dominant online activity, surpassing email and instant messaging
• Social media in the Philippines is primarily used to stay in touch with friends and family (66%), send emails (64%) and for online chats (63%)
• Spread of digital media is changing the way Malaysians are consuming information, particularly news. Key news sources are; online newspapers (53%), Internet portals (47%) and local news sites (46%)
• In Malaysia, online music and video has attracted significant interest with 51% uploading/downloading music files online and 54 % watching video clips online. Over a third of users also play games online – dominated by younger males.

To capture the fast moving changes in mobile use in Indonesia, a Mobile Index study was also conducted.  The Mobile Index provided  a broader study on internet trends in Indonesia which indicated the explosive growth of mobile internet in Indonesia primarily driven by cheap and unlimited data plans with bundled offerings, improved mobile user interfaces, and industry wide marketing, mobile internet penetration has expanded by 26% points from 22% (2009) to 48% (2010).

Key findings of Mobile Index 2010 Indonesia include:

• More than half of mobile internet users belonging to SES A (social economic status-A) or in the age group of 15-24 years use mobile internet everyday
• Mobile Internet usage is predominantly from a mobile phone with advanced features rather than a smartphone as only 11% own a smartphone
• 41% of people surveyed have looked up content or searched for information in the past month; out of those who searched for content, News (54%) and Facts / Trivia (47%) were the most common searches
• Social networking is the key activity with 89% of mobile internet users accessing it in the past one month; 47% access social networking sites at least once a day

Together, the five comprehensive Net Index research studies, sponsored by Yahoo!  have provided the Southeast Asian media, advertising and marketing industries with essentials tools to value the power of the Internet in Southeast Asia.

Stay tuned for more insights and studies that we’ll be releasing in upcoming months!

Ken Mandel
Regional VP Advertising Marketplace, Yahoo! Asia Pacific

As Yahoo! has grown, so has the company’s infrastructure needs. As Chief Architect, Raymie led transformative efforts to rewire Yahoo!, moving from a set of vertical silos to a horizontal platform infrastructure. As this strong foundation is laid, we’re ready to leverage the world’s most diverse collection of content to create innovative, more personalized consumer and advertiser experiences around the globe.

And as our business has expanded in scale and complexity, Raymie has provided technical insight and direction throughout the engineering organization. With his leadership, technical Yahoo’s have focused on core challenges like creating a stable, agile development environment, extracting value from masses of unstructured data, developing scalable global experiences, and architecting a cloud to serve as the foundation for every click across our network.

As CTO, Raymie reports to our Chief Products Officer, Blake Irving and will drive technology roadmaps in partnership with both Chief Scientist Prabhakar Raghavan, who oversees science and research at Yahoo!, and David Dibble, who leads Service Engineering and Operations.

First launched in 2002, the awards encourage internet users to vote online and give recognition to their favourite local and international brands. An independent market research firm was engaged to conduct interviews with advertisers and brands to come up with the nomination list.

After six weeks, we gathered two million votes.

The Yahoo! Emotive Brand Awards ceremony in Hong Kong was held on 19 May 2010 at the Four Seasons Hotel and was attended by more than 200 advertisers, brand representatives, luminaries and media.

The top three winning brands are: Canon, Cathay Pacific Airlines and the Hong Kong Ocean Park.

Following the great success of the initiative in Hong Kong, this year, Yahoo! Kimo in Taiwan launched the same awards in the market and introduced a new category – ‘Yahoo! Asia Emotive Brand Award’ to find the brands consumers in both Hong Kong and Taiwan love. The top three winners for this category include 7-Eleven, Sony and Sony Ericsson.

Check out the event videos:

As the leading online advertising platform in Asia, Yahoo! in Hong Kong and Taiwan continue to help brands leverage the online medium to better connect and interact with their consumers. Stay tuned for more exciting initiatives and campaigns from Yahoo! in Asia!

Jeff Han
Vice-President, Marketing, APAC Region

The Art and Science of Advertising

Key Scientific Challenges Blog Series, Entry # 4:

Late January, we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program, what we hope is a thought-provoking series of guest blog posts here on Yodel Anecdotal that offer a quick overview of these scientific challenge areas. Check out our last post on microeconomics and social systems.

Today, we cover advertising, which is yet another important topic related to the Web. We’ve recruited Vanja Josifovski from Yahoo! Labs to give you a glimpse of how significant advertising is to the online world.

If you’ve seen Mad Men, you’ll know what it’s like to develop an infatuation with the 1960s advertising world – the fashion, the glamour, the old technology. While we’ve come a long way since then, advertising continues to remain a large part of our daily lives and a permanent fixture of our online experience. Here at Yahoo!, we have a special appreciation for the undercurrents of online advertising because it supports a large swath of the Internet ecosystem.

Generally, web advertising closely follows the same two major models of traditional advertising.

First, there is direct advertising, which simply means that the goal of the ad is to get a direct response from the viewer. A good example is sponsored search where ads are shown beside a search result. The most difficult thing with this type of advertising is making sure the ads are relevant. If you searched for the word puzzle – did you mean jigsaw, crossword or Legos? These are complex issues we have spent a lot of time thinking about – and not in the Mad-Men-sit-back-with-whiskey way, but more of a microeconomics, super-computing way.

And then there is brand advertising, which aims to create a favorable impression about a brand or a product. In this construct, ads are usually served up by graphical means, in what we call display ads on web pages. The challenge is matching the placement/context of the ad with behavior of the viewer, both of which also introduce a stunning number of variables and data points.

In both modes – search and display – some complex learning algorithms are needed to provide relevant ads to a user. In a nutshell, it is this problem of relevance that makes advertising one of our Key Scientific Challenges. And it’s also central to the somewhat newer concept of computational advertising — a scientific discipline we developed at Yahoo! Labs that aims to formalize the problem of finding the best ad for a given user in a given context.

It sounds logical enough, right? Can we really build a system that serves the most relevant ad to a user every single time? Can we bring advertising into the realm of the other “computational” sciences? Well, we think so and we’re working hard to tackle that kind of personal relevance. It’s simply going to take some hard core science, some persistence, and continued sharp thinking and hopefully more programs like those at universities (Stanford has a leg up) and our own Key Scientific Challenges to crack it.

Vanja Josifovski
Yahoo! Labs

P.S. If you’re curious about just how big a deal Computational Advertising is, one of Yahoo!’s foremost experts in the field, Andrei Broder, was just elected to the National Academy Engineering. That’s pretty good testimony that advertising is a little bit art AND science.

That was easy, right? Well, that’s thanks to ad agency creatives who turned simple brand messages into iconic household catchphrases. They make it look easy, but it’s not. And it can be even tougher when creating online advertising because there’s more to it than simply putting an ad on TV. We know all about that and are working with our advertisers to foster big, memorable ideas online.

Here’s a digital short that our creatives produced to pay homage to all those creatives out there:

For the full story behind this video, head over to our new Yahoo! Advertising blog.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Have a look:

The spot debuted online on Yahoo! (you.yahoo.com) as well as on sites like Yahoo! Video, YouTube, Facebook, and Hulu.com. It will also begin airing on all the major U.S. TV networks and top cable channels, including AMC, ESPN, USA, Comedy Central and Bravo. You’ll see it in the UK and India starting October 5, and in other markets in 2010, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan.

Whaddaya think?

Stay tuned for behind-the-scenes insights into Anthem’s production…

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

The core of our message will focus on YOU. It will celebrate all of your individual wants, needs, interests, and passions. That’s because Yahoo! really is all about you — we’re constantly evolving to give you more of what you want and less of what you don’t. We want you to make the Web your own and are designing products to put you in the driver’s seat of your Internet experience. Our new brand positioning reflects that.

Our campaign will kick off in the U.S. on Monday, September 28, expand to the U.K. and India on October 5, and reach other markets in 2010, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan. We’re quite serious about our vision to be the center of people’s online lives. You’ll find us what might seem like everywhere online, on network and cable TV, on the radio, in print, and outdoor.

Why now? We are relentlessly focused on making the Web more personally relevant for you. We’ve backed that up with major product enhancements during the past few months. We recently updated Mail and Messenger with new tools and features. In the week ahead, our new homepage — the epitome of openness and personalization — will be broadly available in a number of global markets. And, today, we’re debuting the new Yahoo! Search experience. Of course, there’s plenty more to come, and although we’re still one of the most recognizable brands in the world, now’s the time to start retelling our great story and revitalizing our bond with people.

I should also note that people like you helped shape the message of this new campaign. We conducted a massive research effort that involved focus groups with thousands of people in seven countries. It helped us confirm that a brand refresh was in order, that people crave an answer to “What is Yahoo! all about?”, and that, although we’ve drifted apart a bit, people around the world still want to love Yahoo!.

This is much more than an advertising campaign. It’s our promise to you that your life online will become more personal and more meaningful with Yahoo!. We believe we offer the only Web experience that converges your personal world and the world at large to create integrated, personally relevant experiences. And it sets the direction for how we will deliver awesome new experiences and continue to push the frontiers of science and technology to invent Web products and services that will dazzle you for years to come.

You’ll hear lots more about the campaign in the coming weeks. Be sure to check back on Monday when we pull back the curtain. We look forward to hearing what you think. We want you to get more out of the Web, so you can get more out of life.

Elisa Steele
EVP & Chief Marketing Officer

This week, Manhattan will be abuzz with thousands of brand stewards and creative types, coming together to pay tribute to the best in advertising and share visions about what the future brings. And Yahoo! will be there in force – helping marketers understand how to make the most of the online medium.

In honor of the occasion, CEO Carol Bartz and a bevy of senior Yahoo! executives rang the opening bell at NASDAQ this morning. Here’s video to prove it:

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Beginning today, with the launch of Yahoo! My Display Ads, businesses of all sizes can easily launch display advertising campaigns on Yahoo! to reach the targeted audiences that matter to them most. The new solution is an easy and affordable way to create and run display ads on Yahoo! – even without a major ad budget. In fact, a campaign can cost you as little as $30 per day.

So, how does it work?

Let’s say you own a local boutique shop and you want to reach local-area women. With Yahoo! My Display Ads, you can build a customized ad campaign in a matter of minutes. First, choose from our more than 800 ad templates (organized by business category) and customize the text, images, colors and add your company logo —no design expertise necessary. Then, set your budget and decide who you want to target — by Yahoo! channel content, age, demographics, and location. For example, you could target females between the age of 18-24 in your city. (Keep in mind, though, that the more you target, the less potential traffic you may receive. We recommend starting broad and working your way smaller.) You can even decide whether you want to pay by how many times your ad was viewed or by how often it was clicked on. Finally, we give you daily reports on how ads are performing and let you easily adjust your campaign on the fly.

We partnered with Seattle-based AdReady to develop this service, marking the first time that businesses with ad budgets of all sizes can reach localized portions of Yahoo!’s 165 million users in the U.S. with targeted display ads. To learn more, check out mydisplayads.yahoo.com and get started!

Amanda Reierson
Director, B2B Marketing

That’s one scenario that demonstrates how valuable online advertising can be when it’s customized to your personal interests. It’s the kind of relevant advertising that saves you time and money – travel discounts, coupons, retailer sales, etc.

But we know that kind of customized advertising isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (or bowl of curry).

That’s why we’re introducing a new privacy choice, giving you greater choice in how you manage your privacy online by letting you opt-out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com

We announced that new capability today in a letter to Congressman John Dingell (D – Mich.), the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that recently sent an inquiry to 33 companies about ad customization. You can read the full letter here. This new choice has been in the works for some time now, but we chose to move up our announcement so that we could share this information with Congress today.

It won’t take effect until the end of the month but you can opt out today by clicking on the “Privacy Policy” link at the bottom of virtually every page on the Yahoo.com network and look for the “Opt-Out” link in the sidebar.

Since most of Yahoo! is free, we know there’s not much preventing you from up and leaving us at any time. That’s why we work hard to earn your trust. And we think that comes with offering transparency and choice about the options available to you.

Anne Toth
Head of Privacy & VP – Policy