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

What do you do if you’re the CEO and president of a company that’s become the preoccupation of the business section and you’re about to go on stage in front of hundreds of tech moguls, investors, and journalists at “D: All Things Digital” for a chat with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg? You cue the video!

Here’s a short video prelude we pulled together for Jerry Yang and Sue Decker to help pull the elephant squarely into the middle of the room this afternoon at the 6th annual D conference in Carlsbad, Calif. It’s a parody of the vast quantities of advice that both execs have been receiving about Yahoo! in recent months. And we got a little help from our friends — Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz (our first investor), PBS’ Charlie Rose, Sony’s Howard Stringer, Intel’s Paul Otellini, Dell’s Michael Dell, Cisco’s John Chambers, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

For Yodel Anecdotal readers, we’re posting a special version with an exclusive Buffett outtake at the end. It’s clear why Warren was invited to cameo on “All My Children.”

Yahoo! will be filing a definitive proxy statement and accompanying WHITE proxy card with the SEC in connection with the solicitation of proxies for its 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Stockholders are strongly advised to read Yahoo!’s 2008 definitive proxy statement when it becomes available because it will contain important information. Stockholders will be able to obtain copies of Yahoo!’s 2008 definitive proxy statement and other documents filed by Yahoo! with the SEC in connection with its 2008 annual meeting of stockholders at the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov or at the Investor Relations section of Yahoo!’s website at yhoo.client.shareholder.com. Yahoo!, its directors, and certain of its officers may be deemed participants in the solicitation of proxies from stockholders in connection with Yahoo!’s 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Information concerning Yahoo!’s directors and officers is available in its preliminary proxy statement filed with the SEC on May 22, 2008.

(Incidentally, this video is the dog that ate my homework and is the reason why you loyal readers found last week’s content a bit sparse. I’m a multi-hat operation.)

Photo by Asa Mathat/AllThingsD.com

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.