Yahoo! brought together advertisers, bloggers, agencies and big brands like Sara Lee and Harpo Studios for an engaging panel discussion of its Connectonomics Women  study. Held at the beautiful Ivy Room in Chicago, the event was stimulating and chic—two qualities every woman enjoys.

Watch this video for expert marketing tips straight from the event:

And take a peek inside the event with these photos:

Iain Tate, Global Interactive Executive Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy, is the bright spark behind the campaign that transformed Procter & Gamble’s Old Spice from venerable shelf-filler into a buzzworthy icon.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone who heard Tait speak about advertising’s embrace of digital at the recent Yahoo! Provoke Summit.

He observed that those stuck with traditional thinking dislike the new reality in which “the best stuff wins,” but it’s now the public instead of “experts” determining what’s best. Furthermore, advertising professionals too often seek inspiration from looking at other ads. “That’s the last place you should be looking,” Tait says.

Success requires watching for what people actually do in real life with technology and with each other. And for those biding their time until things settle down? It’s never going to, Tait warns: “We just have to learn how to deal with it and thrive on it.”

Gannett Co. and Yahoo! have formed a partnership that will bring Yahoo’s advertising power to Gannett’s 81 local publishing organizations and seven of its broadcast units.

Gannett’s local advertisers will gain a broader online audience—as much as 80 percent of each market’s available digital audience —and the ability to specifically target their messages with APT from Yahoo!. This means that local advertisers have the ability to reach their audiences based on geography, user demographics, user interests and more.

Yahoo! also plans to work with Gannett to bring select local content from Gannett publications to Yahoo! properties in the U.S., including the Yahoo! front page.

This new partnership builds on the success of the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium, which includes more than 800 newspapers and has already sold more than 40,000 local ad campaigns onto Yahoo!.

You can read the press release here and look forward to seeing the benefits of the Gannett and Yahoo! partnership starting this quarter!

Cannes Lions may be over, but the intrepid Yahoo! team who covered the event continues to deliver. Here they speak with Chris Moloney, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Experian, who explains why Cannes Lions is valuable even for companies like his.

Moloney also shares his thoughts on the relationship between traditional and online advertising. He has well-defined and unexpected reasons for disagreeing with “this perception that the traditional media, the TV media, is dying–is being broken apart into many pieces.” Enjoy the video for more detail:

This video captures Nick Parish, North American Editor for Contagious Communications Ltd., talking with Yahoo!’s Shane Steele at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival about the industry’s tempered return to confidence and how the newest challenges are an integral part of growing into the future.

“We’re chiefly concerned with non-traditional idea transmission–non-traditional media, non-traditional campaigns,” says Parish. “And I think in that space the biggest challenge for marketers right now is how to measure engagement.”

The hardworking Yahoo! crew at Cannes Lions 2010 is packing up their bags until next year. So while they gather their sunscreen and souvenirs, let’s take a look back at the past few days of friends, fun and sunshine.

Here’s just some of our favorite moments:

It felt like I spent all day counting photo views of a Ben Stiller photo, but there was actually a lot happening in advertising in Cannes even after he left. Here’s what you missed:

•  The Great Divide: R/GA talked about a theme they’ve been pushing in recent months: how to combine story with the technology platform. It doesn’t always work because of tech people who don’t know story, and creative people who don’t know tech because they’re “gifted at telling the story…of their careers,” says Nick Law, R/GA North America chief creative officer.
• That little company called Facebook: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg packed an auditorium today to be interviewed by Abby Klassen of AdAge.  He didn’t get too many tough questions about privacy, as he did with AllThingsD, but he did get the chance to say that Facebook could grow to a billion users.
• Another Cannes celebrity: Kraft brought in Spike Jonze to talk about creativity, and to talk about I’m Here, a new 30-second film about two robots in love—and sponsored by Absolut Vodka. The ability to say no is a creative’s greatest power, he said.
•  Storytelling at scale: Coca-Cola’s Joe Tripodi talked about the challenges of taking a company’s story and making it relevant to the 140 countries it serves worldwide.  The key? Plenty of heart, plus science and art. That’s a combination we can get behind.

Yahoo! adds to the many colors that already make Cannes such a festive place during Cannes Lions 2010.

Here’s one of the ways Yahoo! spent its day.

Yahoo! was all over Internet Week—in particular, at Internet Week HQ where we created some funky installations designed to bring the Internet to life. You could send a photo from Internet Week mobile app to a photo mosaic wall, graffiti on a big-screen TV, or even build something real with one of our innovative partners, MakerBot. The slideshow below contains all of that, plus a look at the Yahoo! Provoke Summit. For more photos, take a look at pics from yesterday’s Webby Awards.

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