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

Category: Rich Media

Challenge: Disney needed to create a captivating advertising experience closely tied to its magical  new summer movie The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  They also wanted to leverage social media to drive buzz for the release and extend reach online.

Solution: Yahoo! used a Floating Ad takeover to create the illusion that The Sorcerer bewitched the Yahoo! Movies page.  Disney’s innovative campaign also incorporates a unique social media element: a moderated Twitter feed that reposts tweets about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  In an effort to capitalize on the power of peer-to-peer recommendation, a call-to-action was added for Yahoo! users to retweet from the ad. 

Users who click are redirected to Twitter to logon and the Tweet field is pre-populated with properly formatted text.  All the user has to do is click ‘Tweet’ to retweet the comment.  Tweets then go through a moderation process and appear in the Yahoo! ad as if by magic.

To view the Disney rich media ad, click here.

For more on other Rich Media ads, visit the Yahoo! Advertising Creative Showcase.

—Dianne Molina

In this video, taken from last week’s Cannes Lion Advertising Festival,  Lincoln Bjorkman, Digitas’ wunderkind SVP of Creative, talks to Yahoo! VP of B2B Marketing Communications, Shane Steele, about losing pounds for the summer, re-invigorating your agency, and creating art that scales.

Look for more Yahoo! Videos from Cannes in the coming days. In the meantime, check out these great clips from advertising’s fabulous Euro-confab:

• Yahoo!-Cannes video roundup
• Yahoo! CMO, Elisa Steele, and others show their Cannes-do spirit
• If you build a brand castle, clients will come—our tribute to our brand leaders
• Ben Stiller, uncut

— The Team

Category: Rich Media

Challenge: Paramount knew they had a loyal fan base with Transformers, but they needed help figuring out how to reach existing fans as well as a broader audience that would be needed to make this release a success.

Solution: Paramount worked with Yahoo! to develop a comprehensive online plan that would help turn fans into evangelists, disseminating Transfomer excitement across the Web. Components included:

• A custom microsite targeting that provided fresh content on an ongoing basis, that acted as a hub for content that encouraged fans to create community by sending content to others.
• A Front Page road-block, behavior targeted display advertising on key Yahoo! properties
• A branded WOW module on Sponsored Search
• Exclusive trailers on Yahoo! Movies

The campaign helped Transformers open as the Number One movie in the U.S. and grossed almost $400 million at the box office.

To view the ad again, refresh your browser.

For more on this and other Rich Media ads, visit the Yahoo! Advertising Creative Showcase.

— The Team

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

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

New iPhone unveiled, New York Times sees red ink
Apple’s Steve Jobs famously presented the new, slimmer, more powerful iPhone this week and just as famously had networking problems at the unveiling. We feel his pain—it happens to everyone in our biz at least once a year, usually when presenting the year’s biggest pitch to the year’s most important client. But then the New York Times got all huffy over the smart phone’s new Pulse News Reader app, which, the paper said, makes inappropriate commercial use of the newspaper’s content. Apple agreed to remove the app. The battle over who owns content continues.

The two-cocktail inspiration
“Two drinks may be just enough to lower your inhibitions, but not enough to get you into serious trouble,” writes punk rocker and BrandFlakesforBreakfast blogger,  Darryl Ohrt, in AdAge, on promoting creativity in the agency. “With your inhibitions lowered, you’d likely say ‘yes’ to things that you’d typically over-think and turn down, if completely sober. Plenty of brands could benefit from this kind of thinking.” Sounds a little too “Mad Men” for our analytics-driven crowd, but maybe we’ll give it a—*hic*—try.

Guerilla marketing and social media
Building on Mike Smith’s “Guerrilla Marketing Tips and Trends for 2010,” Adotas’ Murray Newlands provides a definition and capsule history of guerilla marketing practices, and offers some sound advice on how it can be effective through social media.

Twitter now offers its own link shortener
For those of us used to using third-party products like bit.ly, tinyurl and Tweetdeck to cut the URLs in our tweets down to size, Twitter itself now offers its own URL shortener, with tracking, reports Wall Blog.

Is your site SEO or SEF?
There’s “search engine friendly” and there’s “search engine optimized.” Mark Jackson, writing in ClickZ, says that your techies often confuse the two, and that’s a mistake. What’s the difference? Read on.

Creative Spotlight: 10 best World Cup-related ads
Writing on BNET, Jim Edwards offers his “10 Best Ever World Cup Ads.” We embed the top one here, an Adidas ad filmed at the Star Wars Cantina, in “that wretched hive of scum and villainy,” Mos Eiesley, on the home planet of Luke Skywalker, Tatooine. That Snoop Dogg is wicked with a light saber. For the rest, click over to Edwards’ column.

— Micheal Mattis

Yahoo! Branded Game

In-game advertising offers unique reach and  engagement
With spending on in-game advertising projected to grow to $1 billion by 2014, major brands like Kellogg’s, Pepsi and Friskies are getting in the game—and they’re betting big on Yahoo! Games. Here’s why: Not only is Yahoo! Games the number one gaming portal on the Web, but it also gives advertisers frequent opportunities to connect with their customers through in-game advertising.

Yahoo! has an unmatched catalogue of 800 casual games, ranging from traditional crossword puzzles to more immersive titles with winks to pop culture, such as Escape from Lost Island. The site includes both free plays and paid downloads.

And casual online gamers can’t get enough. In March alone, the portal attracted 13.6 million unique users who spent more than 575 million minutes on the site and visited more than 294 million pages. Yahoo! Games also ranks number one with the more than 65 million estimated women in the United States who play casual games.

“With in-game advertising, Yahoo! offers brands not only a broad audience across several key demographics, but also a unique opportunity to accomplish what every advertiser wants: recurring brand engagement through real interactivity,” says Walter Doublestein, Yahoo!’s Senior Producer of Gaming.

The in-game advantage for advertisers
Advertisements have been seen in online games for more than a decade. One in-game advertising model borrows heavily from the “product placement” approach common in the TV and film industry. This type of in-game ad can appear in the form of a branded billboard within, say, a racing game. With this non-disruptive approach, brands are woven into the fabric of an online gaming environment.

Another common form of in-game advertisements are “trailers” or “bumpers” at the beginning, middle or end of a game—similar to what online video consumers have come to expect in recent years. The competitive advantage to advertisers on Yahoo! Games? Ads can be either video or static; plus, they are displayed to users on a two-panel “spread” in a very large game player window. According to Doublestein, the size and flexibility of this digital canvas quite simply gives advertisers the space to get more creative, develop more memorable campaigns, and have better brand impact.

Games customized around your brand
Yahoo! Games offers advertisers another compelling, more customized option: developing a game entirely around a brand itself. Yahoo! game developers pitch several creative concepts—sometimes based on a theme in TV ad campaigns the brand might be running—and the advertiser chooses the right game for their brand. Brands such as TNT, Yoplait and Progressive have all found that this is an ideal way to deliver an advertising message in a gaming context.

These branded games are seen as more than advertisements, since they’re frequently in the top five games on Yahoo! Games and several average more than ten minutes of engagement. “The best part,” Doublestein says, “is that this kind of passive ad messaging is embraced by consumers long after initial launch, meaning they keep coming back and reengaging over and over again.”

For example, Friskies worked with Yahoo! to develop a game targeting women over 35 who love cats. The result, Friskies Wonderland Quest, was the top game on Yahoo! Games for two weeks and among the top 20 for the year. At one point, the free game was garnering about 100,000 game plays a day, extending the brand well beyond the intended audience.

Even though in-game advertising is relatively new, Yahoo! Games offers what advertisers have always wanted: the art of creating immersive consumer experiences that marry advertising and original content. Just more of it.

— Dianne Molina

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