What is the Holy Grail for online marketers? Well, it starts with knowing in real time whether your campaign is working or not. And it ends with turning that insight into tweaks that improve performance.

After all, nothing is worse for advertisers — and consumers — than marketing that bombs.

Enter IndexTools, a leading provider of Web analytics software for online marketing, which we announced we’re acquiring today. Their technology will give our customers tools for monitoring and analyzing websites and marketing campaigns, providing valuable insights into key metrics, traffic patterns and performance. And that means consumers are more likely to see marketing content that’s engaging and relevant.

We’ll initially make these tools available to our vast community of 150,000 small- to medium-sized business customers, but we’ll eventually extend them to third party developers who can use them to track how their applications are performing with visitors.

When it comes to marketers, we have just one goal: To be their partner of choice. IndexTools is another great arrow in our quiver.

Bassel Ojjeh
SVP and Head of Yahoo! Strategic Data Solutions

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

As evidence of our strategy to become the “must buy” for the most advertisers by ensuring the most effective and easiest marketing solutions, I am pleased to announce a significant strategic partnership with Nestlé USA in support of their rebranding effort for the iconic American candy bar, the Butterfinger. Effective immediately, the company will officially changed the name of the bar to “The Finger.”

To quote Nestlé’s press release announcing the initiative, “The renaming program reflects the results of a two-year comprehensive study conducted by the company into consumer perceptions of the Butterfinger name. According to the study, an overwhelming majority of consumers identified the phrase with undesirable traits, such as being clumsy, awkward, and lacking in physical coordination, skill, or grace.”

Nestlé has partnered with Yahoo! to provide consumers with a robust, turnkey solution for providing fans of the crispety, crunchety, peanut-buttery taste with more insights into the brand transformation. The robust new packaging instructs users to go to Yahoo! and search for “The Finger” to find more information, creating unique synergies and cross pollination opportunities between the two leading brands.

This cutting-edge campaign leverages Yahoo!’s pioneering approach toward creating premier opportunities for its marketing customers. We believe this sort of high-performance solution will continue to empower marketers to broaden their horizons as they build next-generation online brand identities.

UPDATE: Ok, people, you’ve probably figured this out by now — this is all just a load of April Fool’s horse puckey. But we are partnering with Nestlé to launch the new Butterfinger Comedy Network on Yahoo! Video, featuring hundreds of the funniest comedies, spoofs, pranks, and standups from across the Web. And Nestlé actually is distributing these clever babies — 200,000 free Finger bars are now available at 2,000 7-Eleven stores across the country. Or you can bid on one on Ebay’s Giving Works site. Tasty.

Curtiss Barr
Director, Global Partner Solutions

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.