Twenty years ago, busy intersections had steep, dangerous curbs onto the pavement. Today they boast gentle ramps that help those with impaired mobility move smoothly into the crosswalk. This is thanks in no small part to the Americans with Disabilities  Act (ADA), signed into law on July 26, 1990. And just as the ADA has helped make the physical world more accessible, Yahoo! is helping make the cyber world more accessible.

Enabling the physical, digital and advertising worlds
Some 650 million people around the globe live with disabilities. Enabling everyone to move smoothly online lets users, regardless of their abilities, get the information they need, when they want it. In fact, according to the National Organization on Disability, 48% of Americans with disabilities say that the Internet has significantly improved the quality of their lives.

And with the potentially vast scale of this audience, no one can afford to say, “You can’t do that.” The purchasing power of people with disabilities tops $1 trillion, including $220 million in discretionary income, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

To demonstrate Yahoo!’s commitment to inclusion, we’re running a pair of display house ads on Yahoo! Travel: one on how to find the best sushi in your area and another for the new Hollywood summer movie, “Grown Ups.”

To learn more about the art and science of accessibility in online advertising, download our .pdf, “Making Ads Accessible.”

Getting the most for all
At Yahoo!, we’re proud to offer enhanced experiences, on our websites, as well as in our ads, to people of all abilities, taking on the complex challenges that help make our sites and services more accessible to everyone. It is part of the DNA in everything we build, including our homepage, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Answers, Flickr, in ads and beyond.

To help celebrate this all-inclusive anniversary, yesterday we launched the Yahoo! Accessibility blog, which applauds the achievements of those with different abilities and shows how you can get involved and learn about the work Yahoo! is doing in the accessibility space.

For more, visit the Americans with Disabilities page at Yahoo! Events.

— Michael Mattis

In the final part of our series on getting started in online advertising, we look at analytics and optimization.  See part one, “Getting Started in Display,” part two, “Display Ads Go Viral.” And part three, “How to Buy Your First Display Ad.”

When a new display ad goes live on the Internet, it may seem like the end of a process that started with strategy, creative and buying. But in many ways when an ad goes live it’s just the beginning: analytic data comes and that starts the cycle all over again, as information is used to refine and optimize the marketing strategy, creative content, and buying plan.

What’s the data telling you?
For Adam Chandler, vice president of sales for PointRoll, a Web marketing firm specializing in rich media, all the steps of an online marketing campaign are interdependent. “There needs to be a continuous-feedback loop,” he says. “Online advertising allows you to get real-time information and then optimize your current spend based on what the data is telling you. Once you go live, it’s really just the beginning, because you’re now getting feedback from consumers on what they think of your brand.”

Analytic data includes length of time spent interacting with an ad, click-through rates, user demographic information, and whether users filled out a form or forwarded something to a friend.

Display ads get  smart
Increasingly, however, ads are able to optimize themselves. One of the latest innovations in online display advertising is dynamic ads. Yahoo!’s version is known as Smart Ads and uses demographic and clickstream data to target consumers with relevant ads. Pointroll has developed a product called adcontrol. (PointRoll is an official Yahoo! Smart Ads partner.)

Whereas previously marketers would create multiple versions of an ad and then test them extensively for response rates, dynamic ads optimize text, images, colors and other content in real time based on what combinations are getting the most attention from any given target audience.

Last year PointRoll used dynamic ads in a large campaign launched by the Ford Motor Company. To combat the sluggish auto sales that gripped the auto industry during the recession, Ford launched the Ford Advantage campaign. Its dynamic ads targeted consumers at the local level, with logos and links to their local dealers, and continually optimized to find the right colors, cars, ad copy and financial offer.

“By enabling multiple creative combinations via this one buy,” Chandler says, “Ford maximized its dollar value, and through this process were able to optimize based on what was working and what wasn’t, for the best engagement and return on investment. We were able to report some really high interaction and direct-response metrics.”

To learn more about Yahoo! Smart Ads and the innovative technology behind them, check out this video:

 And be sure to visit that Yahoo! Analytics blog.

— Christian Chensvold

Christian Chensvold is a New York-based writer covering business, lifestyle and culture. Visit his blog, Ivy-Style.com.

When you serve a wide variety of people with an even wider variety of services, how do you know which products and messages will work in a marketing campaign? Mont-Tremblant, in the Laurentian region of Quebec, used Yahoo! Smart Ads to dynamically generate customized display ads that connected with its customers. These “smarter” campaigns also revealed some surprising information about its vacationers.

The Challenge
Voted best ski resort in Canada’s Northeast by Ski Magazine 14 years running, the Tremblant resort is an elegant leisure-time complex and village in Quebec with picturesque mountains. The region is thus primarily known for world-class skiing. However, Mont-Tremblant also boasts a few 4 1/2-star golf courses, relaxing spas, 5-star hotels, intimate B&Bs, events, fine dining, a casino and a host of other activities.

Mont-Tremblant’s tourism board wanted to increase bookings for its partner properties in its primary U.S. target market which account for some 40 percent of its business during the winter. For the online marketing campaign, the tourism board wanted to specifically target the greater Boston area and the surrounding New England states. Marketing was a difficult task as Mont-Tremblant offered such a wide variety of activities and deals with different consumers wanting different vacation packages.

The Solution
Mont-Tremblant turned to Yahoo! to increase its bookings through an online presence and to find the optimal marketing message for its vacationers. In the past, the tourism board primarily used a blend of traditional print advertising including newspapers, magazines and billboards to reach its customers, with limited efforts on the Internet.

“Tourism is the perfect industry for selling online because we can develop targeted messages, create great visuals and promote last minute specials,” says Alain Houde, General Manager for Tourism Mont-Tremblant.

Yahoo! Smart Ads was the ideal display solution for Mont-Tremblant to showcase its wide variety of activities and deals. Using Smart Ads technology, Yahoo! could combine various ad elements based on response rates to the campaign, allowing it to optimize ads on the fly and show prospects the most relevant vacation deals based on a combination of visuals, messages, calls-to-action and targeting.
 
One ad, for example, offered visuals of a Mont-Tremblant ski vacation with a call-to-action for flights while another used spa imagery with a call-to-action for hotel rooms. Mont-Tremblant also combined geo-targeting with the Smart Ads solution to pinpoint customers in the greater Boston and New England region.

The Results 
Mont-Tremblant’s Smart Ads click-through rate (CTR), for its most successfully optimized ad, outperformed comparable traditional travel display campaigns by over 200%, according to Yahoo! internal data. The campaign ran over a period of a month and a half.

“Having never run such a campaign, we didn’t really know what to expect,” says Houde. “We were very pleased with the results.”

As an added bonus, Mont-Tremblant uncovered some startling data about its customers.

“We’ve traditionally focused our marketing efforts around our ski deals. But with the Smart Ads campaign, the spa packages actually outperformed the ski packages. It was totally unexpected,” notes Houde. “The Smart Ads data has given us really great insight into what our customers want and that perhaps that we should focus more on a variety of services. We will also use this insight about the spa and ski packages in our marketing strategy, both offline and online, to appeal to a more female demographic.”

With an overall more targeted marketing mix that has shifted to roughly 50% online compared to 30% online in past years, and an emphasis on Smart Ads, Mont-Tremblant increased its fall and winter bookings by 66 percent in the Boston/New England area over the previous year.

“Going from offline to online has been very successful for us and we are very happy with the Smart Ads performance,” says Houde. “We are now considering a Smart Ads campaign for our summer season.”

About Smart Ads: Yahoo! Smart Ads combines advanced targeting and optimization technologies with a customizable template to dynamically create and serve the most relevant ads to consumers based on a variety of targeting data. For example, for a travel advertiser, Smart Ads can match a golf package to one consumer and a beach package to another consumer based on several data inputs including age, gender, geography and behavioral interests. The various combinations of ad elements can result in tens of thousands of different creative executions.

For more on Yahoo! Smart Ads, visit Yahoo! Advertising.

About Mont-Tremblant: Located in the Laurentian region of Quebec, Mont-Tremblant is a world class resort area with picturesque mountains, lakes, villages and golf courses.

— Christine Tseng and Michael Mattis

In part two of our four-part primer on getting started in online display, we look at some of the latest trends and innovations in display advertising. View part one, “Planning and Strategy.”

A few years ago, Oregon residents logged onto the web to find an animated crab crawling across their browser window before making a home for himself inside the four walls of a display ad.

It was a clever use of rich media at the time, recalls Andy Askren, but he isn’t sure it would play today. The ad was created by Askren, creative director of Portland-based advertising agency Grady Britton, for the coastal town of Newport. “At the time it was really successful,” he says, “but I wonder if it would be seen as cheesy today, whereas once it was innovative. The content in online ads has to constantly keep one-upping itself.”

When it comes to creating engaging content for online campaigns, advertising agencies have more tools to work with than ever before. They also have the pressure of trying to innovate in a field where innovation itself is humdrum. 

The catch-22 of innovation
The more innovative display ads get, the more accustomed users get to innovation—and the more quickly they get bored with things they’ve seen before (like those annoying dancing figures used to sell auto insurance, for example). “It seems like we’re headed toward an event horizon where there’s nothing we can do to make display ads more visible,” says Dayn Wilberding, Grady Britton’s director of digital culture. “People know how to tune out those boxes, so there has to be something in there that’s intriguing, interesting and shareable.”

Make your display ads sharable
Yes, you read that right: shareable display ads. Viral and social networking are now influencing the content of display advertising. “Social media is having a huge effect on the behavior of people and advertising, and how they react or don’t react to ads,” says Wilberding. “The sharability and viral effect is very top of mind in terms of how we’re creating ads these days.”

This means that today’s display ads are increasingly just one part of a much larger digital marketing campaign. “If there’s a trend for us,” explains Askren, “it’s that we’re finding more ways than ever to find that what’s in that box is connected to something else. No single box or message is going to deliver the client’s whole message, but will be part of another message to be continued elsewhere.”

Today’s interactive display ads may invite users to a Facebook page “or some other social application that forges a relationship with us, and that eventually leads to a sale,” says Wilberding.

Display is getting smarter
Display ads are also smarter than ever before. They notice the kinds of websites that users are browsing, and ad networks serve them a related suite of ads carefully targeted to the types of products and services in which they’re interested. 

Finally, ad agencies have finally realized that if users are reluctant to click on an ad, it may be because they don’t want to stop what they’re in the middle of doing. Online display ads are increasingly providing an experience that happens in the here and now, not somewhere else. “They now provide you with an experience that happens on the site you’re visiting,” says Askren, “because if you click the ad, you’re deciding not to do what you were doing before. We’re getting more intelligent about not taking users elsewhere, but offering them some sort of value that enhances what they’re already doing.”

Not just clicks, but memorable experiences—that’s what today’s most innovative ads are doing. “I don’t think anyone is thinking of the click-through as the ultimate conversion anymore,” says Askren.

A few memorable experiences from Yahoo! Advertising:

• Paramount’s Transformers
• In-game advertising
• Macy’s Yahoo! Smart Ads campaign

— Christian Chensvold

Christian Chensvold is a New York-based writer covering business, lifestyle and culture. Visit his blog, Ivy-Style.com.

Ever wonder what your home page would like if it were, well, a home? Yahoo! took over our own Yahoo! Front Page with a dynamic ad that visualizes the way we bring together all the reasons you love the Internet—within four walls, no less. Click on through to see how making Yahoo! your online home puts the best of everything —great entertainment, instant news, useful information, captivating content, relevant ads, e-mail, Instant Messaging and more—all within easy reach. Make the web your own with Yahoo!, the one place that brings Your World together with The World.

The takeover is just one part of the new Yahoo! branding campaign that will also show the power Yahoo! has to drive business and build brands. Watch for all of the other iterations rolling out now across all types of media.

— Chris Marlowe

It’s not often as a digital advertiser that you get to work with a big, blank canvas.

Yahoo! today unveiled a new display ad unit for the Yahoo! login page that gives marketers room to try just about anything to spotlight their brands in creative ways—on one of the most-trafficked destinations on the Web.

Some one in ten Americans visit the Yahoo! login page daily, providing marketers with a new, premium advertising solution to reach online audiences at a mass scale. The “take-over” execution transforms the page into a large palette for artful—and impactful—creative.  

This new ad unit utilizes Yahoo!’s rich media solution to deliver a scalable, engaging, and custom consumer experience. Users are able to click on a link placed in the background art that takes them to a page with more information on the advertiser’s offering

AdVentures in advertising
It’s all a part of the Yahoo! Digital AdVentures program, announced earlier this year. The program provides a proving ground for Yahoo! and its advertising partners to collaborate on piloting next-generation advertising solutions as well as conduct and publish research from these programs. 

“We’re committed to providing marketers with the ability to stand out and connect with online audiences by redefining the digital canvas and offering massive reach,” says Mitch Spolan, Yahoo’s vice president of field sales. “There’s no better example of this than the new ad unit on our login page, one of the Internet’s most visited pages, which offers advertisers an opportunity to show off their artistic prowess, with scale that few advertising opportunities can match.”

Check out the new Yahoo! login page, and see what others are saying.

— The Team

After attempting to take in Internet Week all week, I’ve come to one clear conclusion: it’s too much for one person. And with so many wildly different events competing for attention, you’d excuse me if that’s the only conclusion I was able to reach.

But… a few points seemed clear:

• Lines are blurring—between online and offline campaigns, between creative and technology. Campaigns have to be integrated. Agencies are hiring creatives who get tech and techs who can tell a story.
• Social is everywhere. It’s not something separate from marketing. It is marketing.
• Paying for your own drink is crazy—at least when there are seemingly dozens of parties willing to pick up the tab.
• Content matters. There was lots of cool tech on display, but speakers kept on coming back to the content, to the story, to the authenticity of your brand. I liked IAB president and CEO Randall Rothenberg’s take on it in the video below.

There. I just saved you a week.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

If the first part of Internet Week has belonged to content for consumers, today focused on its close siblings: the storytelling and art required to make ads that consumers will love.

Even though the Internet demands a different kind of ad than traditional advertising, the storytelling that makes those ads believable is still as important as ever. “Everything is stories. People think in stories,” said Gerry Graf, the chief creative officer of the Saatchi & Saatchi agency, in an AdAge Creativity and Technology panel that featured some of the top agency talent in New York.

But brand stories are much more complicated to tell, and the technology used for digital advertising can make the telling more difficult. “We tell stories, but we’ve start working with people who aren’t storytellers,” says Nick Law, EVP and chief creative officer of R/GA North America, in a statement that probably alienated half of the audience. “They have Asperger’s Syndrome and food in their beards and no girlfriends and just happen to design great systems.”

Agencies need to hire techies who understand the story, but they also need to make sure that whatever platforms and channels they use serve the story, not the other way around.

The advertising story is increasingly becoming interactive, not only because of social media, but because it’s human nature to want a conversation rather than a speech. “Imagine a date where you did all of the talking and your date just sat there listening to you. It’d be a disaster,” says Nicke Bergstrom, creative director of Mother New York.

A better canvas
Yahoo! showed the creatives on hand at Creativity and Technology what some of our ad formats can do for them. Todd Boes, Yahoo! director of consumer ad experience, said that while video has become standard on the Internet, “Video advertising hasn’t evolved with the platform.” He showed off several new ad formats, including an interactive one that is tightly integrated with text, images and other elements.

Todd also previewed some new ad formats that have social functions built into them. That can mean anything from interacting with an ad to sharing ad content such as videos to your Facebook page. That would make it possible, for instance, to pass along an online coupon to your friends.

Senior creative director Brian Hunt mentioned Yahoo!’s sympathy for creatives (see the video above), and then talked about how we’re trying to make their lives better with better canvases. That included recently launched ad formats, as well as some really cool ones about to launch. What are they? Well, stay tuned for the rest of the story.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

If the content at Internet Week so far tells us anything, it’s this: content matters.

While digital advertising has focused heavily on data and technology the last few years, “Internet Week this year has been about the content renaissance,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. As proof, Randall points to Yahoo! talking about both its Associated Content deal and its branded content strategy, and competitors  AOL and Demand Media laying out content-heavy strategies this week.

Yahoo! senior VP of branded content and B2B marketing Mollie Spilman shared the IAB stage yesterday with Associated Content CFO Michael Cohen to tell the audience what Associated Content means to Yahoo!. Michael said that Associated Content has tried to bring math and science to an industry that has been dominated by art.

He also said that Associated Content represents a powerful component of social media. “When people think of social media, they only think about social networking. But that’s only half of its power. You’re missing out on content creation.”

Associated content has more than two million pieces of content, Michael said, and 380,000 contributors. “It’s the ultimate distributed workforce,” he said.

What makes good branded content?

Yahoo! assembled some of the best minds in branded content in an IAB workshop called “The Power of Branded Entertainment.” Yahoo! senior creative director moderated a panel that included Drew Buckley, COO of Electus, Chris Actis, senior VP and digital director of MediaVest, and Noah Oppenheim, head of development at Reveille.

The first thing the panel did was dispute the notion of branded entertainment itself. “I don’t really enjoy the term branded entertainment,” Drew said. “The goal of any content creator is just to make it good, and to make it entertaining.”

Consumers view branded entertainment almost everywhere they go, since it’s already being paid for by advertisers. “Most entertainment is branded entertainment unless you’re seeing it on PBS,” Noah said.

The panelists discussed whether some advertisers are better suited than others to branded content, and what the best ways are to integrate advertiser messages into entertaintment. Noah’s Reveille company created The Office, which frequently includes products in subtle ways. “Content creators can be a little too precious about putting messages in their content, and advertisers are unrealistic about how much messaging they want to be in it,” he said.

Watch the video above for advice on creating great branded content from people who know what they’re talking about.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Category: Smart Ads; Yahoo! AdVentures

Challenge: As Coco Chanel once said, “retail is detail.” Classic department store retailer, Macy’s, wanted to bring to life its popular Memorial Day Sale Book print circular for the Internet generation, targeting consumers in their locales—all while getting the details right.

Solution: To reach a wider, more engaged, yet more targeted audience, Macy’s decided to augment its yearly Memorial Day print campaign, bringing it online with the help of Yahoo! Smart Ads. Working with Yahoo! and the creative agency, Pointroll, Macy’s developed a set of brand new, interactive “pullover” ad units in Yahoo! Mail, the Web’s dominant email provider, that feature summer swimwear, home furnishing, and Memorial Day Book cover features—targeted according the user’s proximity to the nearest Macy’s department store.

The pullover ad unit is visible after the user logs into Yahoo! Mail. Once the user rolls over the ad, he or she is able to view a digital version of Macy’s Memorial Day Sale Book. To keep the Web experience consistent with the print experience, users can flip through the online Sale Book just like the print version.

This new ad unit is part of Yahoo!’s Digital AdVentures program, announced earlier this year. The program provides a proving ground for Yahoo! and its advertising partners to collaborate in piloting next-generation advertising solutions.

— The Team