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

Over the past six months, the term “demand side platform” (DSP) has been disturbingly overused, becoming the online advertising industry’s favorite catch-all term for any company that buys on behalf of an advertiser but resists the monikers of “network” or “agency.” The troubling fact is that the industry has not settled on a reliable definition. Even more troublesome is the fact that “DSP” may not represent the true opportunity in the ad industry, as the need is much bigger than simply a platform to manage demand.

DSP vs. supply chain management
We may be getting into semantics, but a more accurate descriptor might be “advertising supply chain management,” and such a need may not be fully addressed by the players in the DSP space today.

You may have seen Terence Kawaja’s “Parsing the Mayhem” presentation in one form or another. You have may have even used his “buy flow” slide (slide Number 3 from the link above) in a deck at some point.

The most interesting aspect about that slide is not just the fact that you may be pulling yield out of the rates originally intended to pay for an impression, but rather, that you would need a tree of elves to manage the end-to-end process of a campaign, including an agency, trading desk, optimization technology, data inputs (third-party or advertiser-owned), inventory aggregators and inventory originators, to name a few. Most advertisers do not have these resources, hence the need for a supply chain management solution.

Publishers need to outline the gaps in supply chain management that they plan to fill with their own resources, versus the roles better filled by a third party.

Deciding how to approach the supply chain management space is not an easy process. There are three basic strategies:

1. Fully open to enablement—Provide one aspect of the supply chain, such as data or inventory, and use third parties to fulfill the rest.
2. Semi-open enablement—Use third-party companies to fill some areas of the chain, and use third parties to fulfill the rest.
3. Completely closed to third parties—Develop the entire chain internally.

Things often come in threes, and there are three areas that a publisher needs to examine before building a supply chain management strategy:

1. Examine pre-existing conditions.
Are you a publisher or a data company? When you sell inventory, is it primarily on a premium basis (fixed-rate cards) or non-premium basis (marketplace and potentially auction-driven)? I envision this as a four-quadrant chart, with check boxes identifying an organization’s conditions. After assessing the level of control that your organization needs to maintain, you can continue with the development of your strategy.

2. Identify your own core capabilities, and how building a supply chain management system fits their capabilities.
If you are a technology company you may decide to build it. If you are a media company, enablement of a pre-existing technology may be your best path.

3. Determine which relationships need prioritization.
These could be agencies, advertisers, emerging technology companies, data management companies or a slew of others. It’s important to determine the most important alliances and work with those partners to build your strategy. Many groups compete against one another under the umbrella of supply chain management, thus a less informed strategy may alienate your strongest partners.

How does Yahoo! answer these questions?
At Yahoo!, we can check all four boxes. Our agencies rely on us for inventory accompanied by unique data-sets, creating the best value for advertisers. This also creates the greatest yield for us as a publisher. We sell inventory at a pre-determined rate card, maintaining value for endemic and contextually relevant placements, and have a separate segment of inventory that is sold at market rates through an auction (the Yahoo! Right Media Exchange). Our strategy is to offer competitive rates, properly representing and preserving the value of inventory while performing to meet advertiser objectives in both reserve and non-reserve marketplaces.

Competition can ensure quality
We are a technology company as well as a publisher, so we can develop some aspects of supply chain management but feel it is best to rely on healthy marketplace innovation to create areas that we see as commodities. Obfuscated decision-making and display bidding engines are two areas where the market can provide solutions that can plug into inventory. The innovation coming from a competitive marketplace will lead to the healthiest outcome for our ecosystem.

Our longest and most important relationships come with our agency and advertising partners. Publishers need to decide if owning all aspects of the supply chain management are important for maintaining advertiser/agency relationships, or if they will be comfortable having intermediaries bisect agency/advertiser relationships but potentially addressing a system or bandwidth challenge.

This completes my four-part series on demand side platform supply chain management companies. Now on to the industry’s next shiny penny!

— Marc Grabowski, VP, Mid Market Display, North America, Yahoo!

See the other parts in this series:

• Audiences on Demand, Part I: Demand-side platforms and why they evolved
• Audiences on Demand, Part II: Demand-side platforms and how can they can benefit advertisers
• Audiences on Demand, Part III: The fundamentals of choosing a demand-side platform

Editor’s Note: This article is excerpted from Blogging All-in-One for Dummies by Susan Gunelius (Wiley, 2010). Susan is a frequent contributor to our blog.  See her previous posts, “From Return on Investment to Return on Impression” and “The Ultimate Brand Champion.”

A brand is the message, image and promise that your business, product or service consistently, persistently and repeatedly communicates to consumers.

A business blog is an amazing tool for building your brand. Not only does it give you the opportunity to put a voice to your brand, which allows you to develop and meet customer expectations for your brand, but it also allows you to extend your business’ Web presence exponentially. Each new blog post you publish on your business blog becomes another entry point, and with each new entry point comes the potential for more traffic.

As the traffic to your business blog increases, so will the number of loyal readers that your blog attracts, the number of incoming links that your blog receives, and the extent of your business’ online presence. Increased traffic leads directly to building the awareness of your brand to a wider audience who could talk about it, link to your content, tell friends about it, and so on.

Plan to go all-in for the long haul
Much of the power of a business blog as a marketing tool comes from the long-term brand-building effects that a blog presents. For example, a Web search on my name a few years ago would have yielded a small handful of results. Today, a Web search on my name yields tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of results depending on how recently the search engine updated its search index, and that increase in links came entirely from my blogging efforts on both my own company blog and other business blogs that I write for other sources. I went from a non-existent Web presence to a sizeable one in a relatively short amount of time, thanks to the power of the social Web.

There is no secret to achieving that kind of success. It’s just a matter of investing time and sweat into writing great content, interacting with people both on and off the blog, and keeping focused on the long-term benefits of blogging as a tool to build a brand and business.

Your business blog content must offer the same level of brand consistency that all of your other marketing communications do. From your content to your voice and everything in between, a strong brand is one that is consistently presented to consumers. Inconsistency leads to confusion!

Consumers are fickle, but don’t give up
Another critical element of brand-building is persistence. You need to give consumers the opportunity to develop expectations for your brand, which happens organically through persistent (and consistent) brand communications and experiences. After those expectations develop, you must continue to communicate your brand’s messages, images and promises to keep satisfying consumers. You can’t give up.

The unfortunate truth is that consumers are fickle, and they won’t hesitate to leave you if you can’t meet their expectations. By building a brand and consistently and persistently meeting consumers’ expectations for it, you develop a relationship with them that translates into brand loyalty and brand advocacy, which are both essential to developing effective online marketing communications.

Online conversations about your brand can have far-reaching effects. The goal of building your online brand is to start those conversations and keep them going, so there are more and more opportunities for people to find your brand online. After all, there isn’t much point to maintaining a Web presence if no one can find it. That’s like paying for advertising space in a magazine that no one buys. Why waste your time and money unless you’re willing to commit to the long-term brand-building benefits that a business blog can provide?

Instead, focus on the long term when you develop your business blog marketing strategy, and use short-term marketing tactics to enhance that strategy.

— Susan Gunelius

Susan Gunelius is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a full-service marketing communications company. Susan is also a public speaker and the author of more than half a dozen marketing, branding, social media, blogging, business books, including her newest book, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies, and the upcoming 30-Minute Social Media Marketing. Connect with Susan on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Further reading:

• “Simplifying Your Social Universe”
• “Build a Social Media Treasure Map”
•  “Don’t Be Anti-Social” 
• “Is Your Org Chart the Secret to Social Media Marketing Success? “ 
• “7.5 rules for Creating a Great Business Blog”

Did you know that your click could be worth a dollar for charity? You can raise a dollar for Ben Stiller’s StillerStrong Foundation if you view a photo of Hollywood powerhouse Ben Stiller, Yahoo! chief marketing officer Elisa Steele and advertising legend Jeff Goodby taken at today’s Cannes Lions advertising festival.

Ben joined Elisa and Jeff on stage today in a beyond-packed session that maxed out the festival’s viewing spaces. The three participated in a wide-ranging discussion about creativity and storytelling, which covered how technology is changing the creative process on Madison Avenue and in Hollywood. (For more about Ben, Elisa, and Jeff’s session, check back later.)

At the end of the session, Ben posed for a group photo with Elisa and Jeff and a crowd wearing StillerStrong headbands, and uploaded it to Flickr. He asked everyone to view it and share it with their friends. For every click, Yahoo! will donate a dollar, up to $50,000, to Ben’s StillerStrong charity. StillerStrong is raising money for the Haitian School Initiative, an effort to help provide temporary schools for Haitians displaced by the earthquake in January 2010.

$50,000 will pay for one temporary school. Your view pays for part of that school. So click on it, and pass it on!

—Jeff Sweat, blog editor

Cannes, France — The first day of Cannes Lions was a bit of culture shock—not just because everyone was speaking French and I could barely order a sandwich, but also because of the degree to which everyone had gone beach-y. For example, there was the head of JWT’s Continental Europe operations, wearing shorts—and a jacket—on stage, looking like a 12-year-old prep school student.

But even with the laid-back vibe of the crowd, the ideas kept pace with the buttoned-down—or at least, shoe-wearing—world of advertising outside of Cannes. Here are four ideas you should know about, even if you weren’t here:

1. Where does creativity come from? David Harris, Executive Director of British agency Wunderman, spent months trying to figure out where inspiration comes from. He turned to neuroscience, religion, even mind-enhancing rugs, and somehow brought inspiration into a sense of order. All inspiration has six parts:
   ~ Discovering the problem
   ~ Thinking time
   ~ Dispersal – In other words, walking away from the problem and letting inspiration strike. The problem is, “It’s looked down on as laziness. Investing time and money in something with no output is a hard sell.”
   ~ The trigger – something that puts the pieces together.
   ~ Epiphany – Sometimes this involves overcoming our cultural programming to see the answers.
   ~ Communication
2. Time is currency: Every advertiser needs to find a way to get consumers to part with the one thing they can’t spare: time. So, said JWT chairman Bob Jeffrey, you have to create ideas that people want to spend time with.
3. Sales lives: Ogilvy Worldwide held a competition on stage to name the world’s best salesperson; each of the three finalists had to sell a Motorola Smartphone. The winner was Todd Herman of Edmonton, Alberta. But advertising agencies need to stop thinking of sales as an awkward foot-in-the-door kind of thing, says Ogilvy Group UK’s Rory Sutherland. “I’d plea for this to be fully part of advertising and marketing—and not be someone else’s job,” he said.
4. The world is going mobile: As mobile phones replace PCs in some homes and become a true “second screen,” says Eric Bader, Chief Strategy Officer Worldwide of Initiative, mobile marketers have four wins facing them: Higher media ROI, in-store marketing, loyalty and customer relationship management, and more engagement with the brand.

I’ll be back tomorrow, dressed more casually but just as ready to talk marketing. Au revoir!

— Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

New study helps us learn about our fathers

The result: 2010 Yahoo! Audience Insights, a comprehensive look at how key audience segments spend their time online. In this ongoing blog series, we’ll share the exclusive insights that emerged and tips for better targeting key demographics. And in honor of Father’s Day, we are kicking the series off by giving you a glimpse at how dads spend their time online.

Dads value productivity
There are 37.9 million dads online between the ages of 18 and 64. According to Yahoo! Audience Insights, 34% of dads characterize their personal use of the Web as heavy (25+ hrs per week). They are career-focused and use the Web to achieve career goals and managing finances.

Dads see productivity as a key benefit of the Web. Seventy-two percent of mobile device owners value the ability to be “productive” on-the-go. Up-to-the minute news is also a big focus, with 47% reporting they tend to be more in-the-know and informed of current events than most.

Dads are shoppers
In today’s economy, money is on everyone’s mind, and dads are no exception. Thirty-five percent reported a willingness to make personal sacrifices for financial success. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t using the web to spend their hard-earned cash.

Almost half (43%) of dads reported buying consumer electronics online in the last month, and they also use the Web to research new products and stay in-the-know. In fact, 27% say they’re among the first to buy new tech gear and gadgets, and 41% say people often come to them for advice on the best products to buy.

Dads will be boys
This next finding won’t come as any surprise to the wives of America: Dads spend significant time online on sports, games and news sites. In fact, the top three daily online activities for dads are watching live sports or highlights, updating/getting news on fantasy sports, and checking sports scores or news. Twenty-six percent of dads use their mobile devices to play games and check sports scores andnews.

Five tips for targeting dads
So what does this all mean spell for marketers? One word: opportunity. Here are the five key take-aways to leverage on Father’s Day and year-round:

· Engage them on sports, finance, games and news sites—be in all the places they spend the bulk of their time.
· Shopping online is a common activity—and consumer electronics is a particularly hot category.
· Don’t waste their time—dads need to feel productive, so simplify your path to conversion.
· For dads, the Internet is about function and entertainment, so create content and messaging that appeal to both sides.
· Online dads are on the go and want up-to-date information—extend your reach with mobile.

—Dianne Molina

(Image by daquellamanera via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Yahoo! Labs research scientist Duncan Watts brought some serious thinking to Internet Week yesterday when he explained for the Mashable audience the science behind social media.

Yahoo! has extensively analyzed Twitter streams—what gets tweeted and retweeted—and found that “99% of tweets don’t go anywhere,” Duncan said. While that may seem like bad news, it actually can be good news for marketers if they learn how to harness the power of a lot of average tweeters rather than one big powerhouse.

Duncan said that Twitter makes a great environment for social scientists, because it involves human interactions that are measurable. He talked about how difficult it can be to predict what will go viral on the Web or not—but that the data gathering made possible by Twitter is making it easier to know what might succeed. For more on that, watch the video below:

Making advertising part of entertainment
Meanwhile, at the IWantMedia “Future of Media,” panel discussion at New York University, Jimmy Pitaro, Yahoo! VP of North America Audiences, held forth with Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post and executives from NBC, Google and Glamour. The panel looked at how both traditional and online media companies are transforming.

Jimmy talked about building out branded content such as our “Who Knew?” news series, and about creating more original sports content. He said that advertising has to engage customers to be successful. “ ‘Banner’ has become a dirty word at Yahoo!,” he said. “If you make the advertising part of the entertainment experience, everyone wins.”

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

In a busy first day of Internet Week for Yahoo!, executive VP of the Americas Hilary Schneider laid out Yahoo!’s content strategy—and explained why advertisers should work with us—in an onstage interview at the CM Summit.

In an interview yesterday with Federated Media CEO John Battelle, Hilary told the crowd that Yahoo!’s content strategy had four major pieces (Watch the video below for Hilary’s description):

1. Premium content: Yahoo!’s traditional syndication of content brands.
2. Crowdsourced content: The reason for our acquisition of Associated Content, which has 380,000 contributors. “We can deliver on the long tail of content needs,” Hilary said.
3. Original content: Yahoo! will continue to invest in bloggers, journalists, and original programming such as our Yahoo! News series, Who Knew?
4. Social content: With the integration with Facebook that launched yesterday and the upcoming integration with Zynga and Twitter, we’ll be able to provide more personally relevant content.

Hilary also explained some of the advantages of advertising with Yahoo!. “There are lots of players who have scale,” she said. “It’s the combination of that with the science and art that’s going to make a difference.” Yahoo! understands what our users are looking for—for example, she says, we’ve learned that men don’t notice ads almost anywhere on the page except for the lower left side, while women respond well to banners at the top of the page.

Yahoo! serves roughly a million versions of the home page each day, Hilary said, tailoring the content to deliver stories of most interest to certain groups of readers. We’ve noticed that men click more frequently on content with brunette women, so include more links about them on the front page. That fact got a lot of attention from the crowd and from John Battelle. “Will you be able to find gentlemen who prefer blondes?” he asked. “We’re working on it,” Hilary replied.

Thought-provoking content
Yahoo! also hosted the Yahoo! Provoke Summit at Internet Week HQ. The mini-conference was meant to celebrate creativity and, frankly, to get the audience thinking.

Ze Frank, humorist and web designer and a bunch of other things, said that social media tools don’t necessarily help you connect with people—they only help you meet people. “These tools are being built by people who aren’t necessarily comfortable around people,” he said in one of the better lines of the night. Advertisers and content producers have to learn to be authentic to connect with their audiences.

Iain Tait, Global Interactive Executive Creative Director, Wieden + Kennedy, talked about the challenges of advertising in the digital world. The enemies to the digital world, he said, are history and comfort—and you have to shatter both. Iain also put out a call for advertising geeks. “In order for digital advertising to succeed,” he said, “we need great creative technological talent.”

Check back throughout the week for video highlights from the Yahoo! Provoke Summit.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

We do it all the time. We find an interesting piece of content—whether it’s a picture of last week’s sinkhole in Guatemala, a World Cup score or an article with breaking celebrity news—and we decide to share it with friends. This could mean emailing it, posting it on Facebook, or tweeting about it. If it really strikes a chord, we might do all three.

But the social universe can still be tough to navigate. Two new product integrations, launching this week, will centralize a user’s social experiences from across the entire Web in one place: Yahoo!

The Facebook connection
Starting globally today, people who use both Yahoo! and Facebook will be able to link their accounts. This means users with connected accounts can get their Facebook newsfeed on the Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Mail and other Yahoo! properties. Plus, if you make a comment, rate an article, or upload a photo on Yahoo! properties including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, or Flickr, you will be able to easily share what you’ve done! on Facebook. An action on one site will be automatically reflected on the other—if that’s what a user wants.

First launched in October 2008, Yahoo! Profiles has always allowed people to centrally manage their identity and activities across Yahoo! But in keeping with Yahoo!’s commitment to privacy, Profiles has been upgraded with a central dashboard that manages a user’s external social network accounts as well as any apps they have linked to Yahoo!, starting with Facebook. The service has been renamed Yahoo! Pulse to better reflect its broader ability to manage settings, privacy, account links, and controls.

What’s next
Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been weaving the best of the social Web into the Yahoo! network through new partnerships. The goal? Creating more personally relevant online experiences that create higher quality engagement. Some of the noteworthy key relationships include:

• Twitter: By the end of the year, a global partnership with Twitter will allow Yahoo! to integrate Twitter’s real-time social experiences across Yahoo!
• Sports: The recent acquisition of Citizen Sports brings the world of sports to Facebook and mobile devices through innovative applications.
• Gaming: Later this year, Yahoo! will integrate Zynga’s most popular social games throughout its global network.

What’s in it for advertisers
For advertisers, the new social connections means that you will be able to combine Yahoo!’s high-quality content with socialization features so that you can engage with your customers in interesting new ways. Yahoo! is actively partnering with advertisers to develop innovative new ad formats that bring social aspects into the ad itself, creating brand evangelists and increasing direct participation with marketers’ messages, which should help increase the ad’s impact and performance.

Yahoo! already offers a complete view of the customer that few sites can match, and these new features will help you understand them even better.

For more details on today’s social launch, visit our corporate blog.

There’s a reason that soap operas are called “soap operas.” They were the original “branded entertainment”—content developed for single advertisers to help them promote their products, the earliest and most notable being, well, laundry soap.

But with the Web, branded entertainment has evolved into holistic content/advertising packages that appeal both to those who are watching and those who are selling. And Yahoo!’s leading that evolution with branded offerings like Shine, The Thread, and The Yahoo! Sports Minute, which utilize consumer data to guide content decisions. It’s a scientific approach that delivers quality content to millions of engaged viewers.

But don’t take our word for it: See Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson’s article in the pink pages of the venerable Financial Times (registration required).

“When users are logged in, we know their age, sex, all their behavior on the Yahoo network and all their search and click-through data.” Yahoo! vice president of media, Jimmy Pitaro, told the Times. “Then we create programming that we think will meet a specific audience need.”

— Michael Mattis