Yahoo! Sports has a Shredtacular Winter Olympics

Great coverage results in record-breaking traffic, click-through rates and engagement

We’re still marveling at the Winter Olympians’ amazing achievements. South Korean luminary Kim Yu-Na earned more points than any previous figure skater.

Snowboarder Shaun White defied the laws of physics with his Double McTwist 1260. And Yahoo! Sports dominated the field as the most visited online destination for 2010 Winter Olympics coverage.

More than 32 million unique visitors chose Yahoo’s site for Olympics coverage, besting its closest competitors NBCOlympics.com and ESPN, which both counted 19 million unique visitors each during February 12 to 28 according to comScore. Yahoo! Sports received more than 40 million total unique visitors during the Winter Olympics, breaking the monthly record in the online sports category and exceeding its closest competitor by more than 19 million unique visitors.

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4A’s Conference Round-Up

The Yahoo! Advertising blog’s got you covered

This week, your indefatigable Yahoo! Advertising correspondents went on a field trip to the 4A’s “Transformation 2010” conference in San Francisco. (Those 4A’s stand for the American Association of Advertising Agencies.) While there, we did old the meet and greet, tweeted, and posted to Facebook our take-aways from some the smartest minds in the advertising world. We even did a little live blogging and took some video, too. (Lookin’ good, Carol!)

Below is a round-up of some the most interesting sessions, in case you couldn’t be there in person.

How Social Media Has Transformed the Communications Landscape
Who: Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor in Chief, The Huffington Post
What: Huffington spoke with considerable humor about how the Internet in general and social media in particular have changed the way people interact with media content. “We”—meaning users as well as media outlets—“are consuming news, sharing news, developing news. We are all part of that story,” she noted. Online readership is up 34 million in the past few years, while newspaper viewership is down 7 million. The key for understanding and engaging the online medium for publishers and advertisers is  “transparency and authenticity.” At the 4A’s conference, she mentioned what she calls the “four E’s:” engagement, energy, empathy, enthusiasm, enrichment. These are the real drivers of audience behavior online.
So What?: The shift in attention to online presents a huge opportunity for advertisers and marketers because the most engaged consumers are the most loyal consumers. Notable quote: “If Carol Bartz is outspoken, what does it make me, a demure shrinking violet?” Probably not, Ms. Huffington.

More on this session via AdAge.

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Video: Carol Bartz on Science, Art and Scale

 “No one can do this as well as we can.”

In an informal conversation at the 4A’s conference, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz says that only Yahoo! can offer everything advertisers need for successful digital advertising: science, art and scale.

Science, Art and Scale

Carol Bartz: What Yahoo! offers advertisers

Yahoo! can bring advertisers a combination of strengths that no one else can, Yahoo! CEO  Carol Bartz said in a keynote speech at the 4A’s Transformation 2010 conference today, because only Yahoo! offers them three things: science, art and scale.

Carol, speaking to the advertising industry group in San Francisco, said, “We want Yahoo! to be the partner you turn to for answers and solutions, and most importantly—when you want results.” By providing science, art and scale, Yahoo can help advertisers and agencies master online advertising.

Science
“Science is incredibly important,” Carol said. “Without it, we’re all flying blind.” She said it’s even more important because the Internet is moving so fast that it’s creating chaos for advertisers. In order to help advertisers sort through that information, Yahoo! can advertisers better insights, better data, and better targeting. “This means less wasted impressions and a better ability to reach your audience,” Carol said. (more…)

Yahoolympics scores 17.5 million fans

Yahoo! attracts largest online Olympic audience, Feb. 8 to 14

Whether it’s figure skating, freestyle skiing , snowboarding, hockey, or this year’s big game, curling, Winter Olympics fans are turning online in record numbers.  And Yahoo!—the single most visited site for the Winter Olympics—is winning the gold in terms of unique visitors.

Yahoo’s Olympics site attracted 9.3 million unique visitors from February 8 to 14, according to comScore. That’s the largest online Olympics audience for the period, which included the Opening Ceremony and the first three days of competition, while Yahoo! Sports attracted more than 17.5 million unique visitors. Yahoo’s Olympics site surpassed both NBC’s Olympics site (6.5 million unique visitors) and ESPN (8.4 million unique visitors) during the same period.

“The Olympics are one of those events that people aren’t willing to wait until prime yime to find out what happened,”  says Kyle Laughlin,  Head of Yahoo! Sports and Games.  “The team did a fantastic job putting a plan in place to deliver the right content at the right time for our users.”

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Audiences on Demand, Part I

Demand-side platforms and why they evolved

In the first of a multi-part series, Marc Grabowski, Yahoo’s head of mid-market display for the North American Region, explores demand-side platforms, or DSPs, one of the most important current trends in the digital ad display market.  DSPs aggregate advertising demand and place media buys for audience-targeted inventory across multiple supply channels—such as exchanges and publishers—while controlling exposure of a message to the audience. Below, Marc uncovers the origins of DSPs and discusses why they have evolved.

Not too long ago, advertisers and agencies figured out that they could buy advertising by audiences—not just by editorial source or, for that matter, by their relationships. That change in buying has created ripple effects that have arguably helped display advertising become more complex than search.

As a result, today we live in a place where networks aggregate publishers. Exchanges aggregate networks and data informs the buy instead of simply justifying it. And the lines between agencies, publishers, and ad networks are blurring as each one shoulders additional burdens to earn greater share of ad dollars spent online.

Display advertising has arguably become more complex than search.

A brief history lesson
Four or five years ago, agencies came to the realization that they should buy beyond editorial adjacency and invest in audiences—so, instead of buying advertising from one group of online sites, they buy impressions among, say, 18-to-35-year-old males, regardless of publisher. Soon after that, the volume of impressions across the Internet spiked due to a proliferation of user generated content. Ad networks created one solution to this problem by aggregating many sites into a single buy. Agencies eventually began buying from multiple ad networks and publishers—up to 800 sites in some cases.

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Where the Kids Are

Today’s teens are more engaged than ever in social media and online games

This is the last of a three-part series on teen behavior online. For Part One, click here. For Part Two, click here.

We already know that teens—boys and girls aged 12 to 17—are online in massive numbers, with 97 percent of the U.S.’s nearly 25 million teens spending an average of 18.5 hours a month on the Internet.

But what do teens do with all that time online? Well, for one thing, they love their games. According to one eMarketer report, 78 percent of online teens in the U.S. play games online—all kinds of them, from massive multi-player fantasies like World of Warcraft to simple racing games and shoot ’em ups. Teens also love instant messaging, with 68 percent swapping stories in quick soundbites. And they are highly engaged by social media: According to eMarketer, 58 percent of teens have a social network profile (though 66 percent of teen girls have a profile vs. 50 percent for boys).

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Demystifying Mobile, Part I

Four questions to ask before getting into everywhere advertising

In this, the first of a three part series, Paul Cushman, Director of Mobile Sales Strategy at Yahoo! explores some basic questions that advertisers should ask themselves before diving into the mobile marketing space.

In my role as Yahoo’s director of mobile sales strategy, I’ve met many clients confused by mobile advertising. But just because it’s mobile doesn’t mean that the laws of advertising have changed.  In fact, mobile advertising today follows much the same pattern and rules as traditional and Internet marketing. Below are four simple rules that I tell our mobile advertisers when considering and creating campaigns in the mobile channel.

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Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Ad man Othmer gets mad; selling the Super Bowl; digital ad budgets to increase; TBWA\Chiat\Day’s doggie dentures ad, and more

A trip through “Adland”
Former Young and Rubicam creative James P. Othmer has a new memoir out, “Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet.” In it, he describes his trials and tribulations in the business. In this AdWeek Q&A, he talks about the many ethical dilemmas faced by ad folks today, as well as other hot topics and ripping yarns. Check out Amazon.com’s promo vid for more.

Selling the Super Bowl
This Sunday is arguably the biggest sporting event of the year, Super Bowl XLIV. Advertisers, according to AdWeek, have shelled out nearly $3 million each for 30-second spots during the big game. “The game is the only significant TV showcase for commercials left in today’s media-fractured environment, and advertisers are frantically putting the final touches on their plays for the day,” writes Eleftheria Parpi. How are they are building buzz around their creative? Hint: the initials are S.M., and we don’t mean the naughty kind.

We’ve got good news and bad news
Remember those old good news/bad news jokes? (Like, the good news: the captain aboard a Viking ship doubles rations for the guys on the oars. The bad news: he wants to go water skiing.) Well, the good news for digital marketers is that two-thirds of marketing execs in a recent CMO.com/Society of Digital Agencies survey say they’ll up their digital budgets in the face of current economic conditions. The bad news? Those conditions still suck.

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What the Kids Want

A psychographic sketch of teens online today

There’s a scene in the first season of “Mad Men” in which advertising anti-hero Don Draper asks his boss, “What do women want?” The answer he gets is flippant to the point of rather ugly sexism. But in the male-dominated world of early-1960s advertising, Draper was on to something. He knew instinctively that to reach America, you had to reach out to America’s new, emerging, liberated woman, a fact later borne out by daytime shows from “Phil Donahue” to “Oprah” and beyond.

Today, the audience to reach is teens, both male and female. Last time, we discussed some salient general facts about teens, their buying power ($125 billion and climbing) and the time they spend online. Today we’ll talk about who these teens are, what they want, and how advertisers like you can reach an audience of nearly 25 million Americans.

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