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:

Yahoo!'s Mollie Spilman with Harpo Studios President Erik Logan and Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo! Shine Brandon Holley

How do you market to women? To answer the question, Yahoo! created a study and invited a panel of marketing and content experts at a live event in Chicago for a select audience of marketing executives.

Speakers at the intimate breakfast event returned to one common theme brought up in the Yahoo! Connectonomics study: despite economic and demographic differences, women’s needs online are often very similar.

“Ultimately as a marketer, you’re not just targeting a single woman,  a baby boomer in Chicago,” said Radha Subramanyam, Yahoo! VP and head of corporate and media research, who introduced the study. “Our products cut across a swath of women. Understanding the common needs of women helps us reach more.”

Brandon Holley, editor-in-chief Yahoo! Shine, the online publication for women,  moderated a panel that included Erik Logan, president of Harpo Studios; Phillippe Schaillee, CMO of Sara Lee; Kim Moldofsky, a blogger and founder of MomImpact; and Danielle Wiley, senior VP of consumer brands at Edelman Digital Chicago.

Know her “day in the life” and tailor your messages to it
Schaillee said that digital marketing becomes more powerful when you understand what a woman needs. “If you really understand what a day in your prime prospect’s life really looks like, and you understand what those connections are, digital opens up a whole new world where you can really tailor your message to her.”

Tell an authentic story
When you’re trying to reach women via multiple channels, says Harpo’s Logan, it’s important to be consistent. For example, he says, Oprah has been able to push into online, radio, and TV by remaining focused on what she—and her brand—does best. “We  are fantastic storytellers,” he says. “We hone-in someone’s authentic voice and we never deviate from it.”

The group talked about the study’s finding  that women are not necessarily receptive to marketing messages on social networking sites, where advertising can be seen as intruding on a conversation among friends. One way around that is to participate in online communities that you—and your brand—are passionate about.  “That way, when you do talk to your audience,” says Edelman’s Wiley, “it’s not coming from someone who’s interrupting a private conversation—it’s someone who’s there already.”

— Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

If you’re marketing to women—and since they make roughly 85% of household buying decisions, you should—you need to know what women are seeking online. So we created the Women Connectonomics study, which examines how and why women are using different kinds of online sites, to help you start connecting with women online in a more meaningful way.

Yahoo! partnered with research firm AddedValue and surveyed 3,000 women across the country, conducting focus groups and one-to-one interviews. The resulting study provides a new framework for targeting women online, one centered around the needs of today’s woman. It found that:

• The most important needs for women revolve around personal growth, as well as their interdependencies on others in their social circle. 
• 44% of women say they get information about products and brands on women’s lifestyle sites.
• Women’s lifestyle sites like Shine and special interest sites fulfill the most needs for women. They also offer anonymity which can result in deep emotional connections for women.
• Women are most receptive to marketing messages on lifestyle, specialty and review sites. These channels deliver 3 times the impact on purchase decisions in comparison to the other online sites we looked at in the study.

Understanding the needs of women
Personal growth and connecting with others emerged as the top reasons women use the Web. This involves specific things like caring for oneself, self improvement and feeling enabled.

Interestingly, we found that the fundamental reasons why women communicate online and what sites they leverage are more similar than different – no matter what age group, profession, or life stage. 

Understanding where women are online
Women revealed they are using a number of online channels to connect with others. We explored the needs of women as associated with their use of the following communication channels and content sites:  Social Networking Sites, Twitter, Email (for personal use), Online Community Groups, Instant Messenger, Blogs, Review Sites, Women’s Lifestyle Sites (Yahoo! Shine, iVillage, SheKnows, etc), and Special Interest Sites (CafeMom, BabyCenter, etc).  The study found that communication channels like social networking and IM are used most often to help women to stay connected. However, the connections through these channels tend to be more casual. 

Content sites like women’s lifestyle and special interest sites fulfill the most needs for women. Surprisingly, the study found that the anonymity these channels offer can lead to deeper emotional connections for women. Women said these sites offer users access to like-minded women and solutions to problems without the risk of being judged by people they know in real life. 

Understanding where women are most receptive
So, where is a woman more receptive to ads? Not all websites are equally persuasive.  We found that women are most receptive to advertising on women’s lifestyle sites, special interest sites and review sites.  In fact, these channels deliver three times the impact on purchase decisions than the other online channels looked at in this study.

By understanding how different channels meet different needs, marketers can optimize how they target women and maximize engagement on each channel.  Simply put, marketing effectivess is a function of Needs + Channel + Receptivity.  Here’s a quick cheat sheet of the top ways advertisers can fine-tune their messages to women by channel:

For more, visit Yahoo! Advertising, or download this .pdf.

—Amy Janis, Senior Manager, B2B Market Research

Online ad spending up
Here’s a little silver lining for agencies and publishers: Online ad spending will see double-digit growth, reaching $61.8 billion worldwide this year and $96.8 billion in 2014, according to an eMarketer report cited by AdWeek. Hopefully that rising tide will lift all boats.

Business schools heart social media
You knew it would come to this. One minute you’re tweeting just for fun about how yummy that bagel was this morning, and the next you’re running a comprehensive social media campaign that “leverages the power of peer-to-peer networks to optimize brand evangelism and foment expanded sales opportunities” for your company. Now it’s official, because B-schools like Harvard and Columbia are offering bit-ticket courses in social media marketing, according to BusinessWeek.

What’s more important? Your keywords or landing pages?
Not surprisingly, the answer is that they’re both vital to your efforts. So says Dan Darnell, director of product marketing at Adchemy. Writing on Adotas, Darnell says that too many advertisers focus on either their paid search ads or their websites, when they should be looking at “the contributions of the entire advertising experience—from keyword selection to bids to ad copy to landing pages.” It’s only obvious after someone takes the time to point it out.

Got an ad for that, señor?
As a marketer, would you willingly overlook a potential audience of 50 million Americans? Well, according to AdAge, some one in six U.S. residents are expected to classify themselves as Hispanic in the 2010 Census. It’s a market with a huge potential—the second largest market in the U.S. Don’t speak Spanish? Don’t worry. Nearly half of that 50 million are perfectly comfortable with English. Muy bueno!

Old Spice sales up 107%
It’s an endless debate in the agency world: What kinds of ads are most effective? Groovy, polished, brand-based ads, or simple “buy now and save” ads? Recently, skeptics had bashed Old Spice’s cool “smell like a man” viral online video campaign as ineffective. But, reports AdAge’s David Griner, your father’s deodorant’s sales are up 107 percent over the last 52 weeks. Coincidence? We think not. (Of course, advertising a sale now and then can’t hurt, either.)

Yahoo! giggles
While sitting in your office today, turn the volume on your computer all the way up, go to the Yahoo! homepage, mouse over the exclamation point in the Yahoo! logo and click. If it doesn’t get a giggle from your coworkers you’re working in the wrong place.

Ad man by day, mohel by night?
On an even lighter note, BNET’s Jim Edwards reports that one lucky Twitter bug has landed a $70K-a-year job at the venerable firm of Saatchi & Saatchi for tweeting, well, a circumcision joke. Ouch.

— Michael Mattis

Marketers have long attempted to label women for marketing purposes, but putting “soccer” in front of “mom” is so 1994. Even “hockey moms” rejected Sarah Palin’s bid to represent their unique demography. And while we’ve yet to see a “crowdsourcing” attempt to create a feminist anthem as alluring as 1972’s “I Am Woman,” women and women who also happen to be mothers have a strong and undeniable presence online.  Maybe, instead of trying to label women and moms, we just try to understand their online behavior and how marketers can target this powerful audience segment.

Women: An engaged  audience of vast scale
There are 34 million women online aged 18-34. Forty-one million moms aged 18 to 64 navigate the information superhighway. And 62.8 million women aged 18 to 49 are going online to connect, catch-up and commune with others—mostly in their local areas. In fact, no matter their age or life stage, women are going online seeking information about their interests, looking to be entertained and wanting to connect with a small, tightly-knit social network. And while not all women are moms, all moms are women so it’s no surprise that similarities abound with a few subtle differences withstanding.

The greatest difference between women aged 18 to 34 and women aged 18 to 49 is the more narrow age range’s use of social networking and texting. Not to say that there aren’t some female Generation X-ers out there with “texter’s thumb”, but the broader age range seems to distinguish itself by being the thriftiest. 49% state they typically save money by purchasing average quality items, and 44% say they are less interested in a big bank account if it means sacrificing balance and quality-of-life.

Women control the purse strings
We can’t talk about moms and marketing to them without mentioning that widespread rumor (or, who knows, maybe it’s backed by statistical data) that moms, or Chief Household Officers—as they’re often called for their uncanny ability to both bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan—control more than 80% of their household’s undesignated spending money.  Combine this tidbit with 42% of moms who say they have bought clothes, shoes, or accessories online in the last month and a marketing opportunity can’t be far behind. The most glaring of the understated differences between women and moms seems to be moms’ emphasis on healthy living. 52% of online moms say they are always on the hunt for information about health and healthy lifestyle choices.

To really outline women’s online expectations would likely require a text as long as The Feminine Mystique; however, in the spirit of sisterhood, I’ll leave you with a few tips for marketers looking to target the female ilk:

• Entertainment, email and local content properties are some of the best places for engaging women online.
• Women are online with a purpose, so help them feel productive and provide opportunities for them to be the “hero”.
• Women are online connecting with a close social network, so provide them with opportunities to share special moments with the people they care about most.
• For women, the Internet is about function, but is also a destination for fun and entertainment. Give them both experiences for best use of content.
• Online shopping is a common thread, but women are savvy shoppers, so help them to be informed and thrifty.

— Stephanie Bilberry

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.

Right Media, right now
If you haven’t been following the Right Media Open conference in Chicago happening now on Twitter, you should be. It’s been pretty knock-down and drag-out, with the feathers flying, to use a couple hackneyed yet appropriate turns of phrase. Among the choice tweets from our intrepid reporter:

• DJakubowski asks why Google didn’t attend Search/Display panel. Do they want last click attribution model to continue?
• G Fulgoni says the interactive industry has not sold itself as a branding medium.
• McGrory—RM/Yahoo! extending supply side RTB beyond Yahoo! to publishers. Demand Media is in!
• Mike Brunick admits that agencies have not evolved as fast as they should. “A system managing efficiency is tablestakes.”

Social gets “searchy:” the urge to converge
Edelman Digital VP, Steve Rubel, quoted by Christopher Hosford in B2B, says that social is about to get “searchy.” We just love that term. The full quote: “Search is an intent-driven medium, where users seek out what they want. Social networking is where the content finds you through the lens of friends. Those two are separate, but I think we’ll see a real convergence here where search will get a lot more social and social will get a lot more ‘searchy.’” Searchy. We just like saying it.

Online video ads to explode
And by “explode” we don’t mean literally blow up, but grow really, really fast. According to an eMarketer report cited in AdWeek, the video ad market is expected to grow more than 48% this year alone. Four years from now, eMarketer expects the online video ad market to by worth $5.5 billion, up from $1.5 billion this year.

Old Spice, new life
The new buzz phrase is “heritage brands.” These are brands with a lot of history behind them, like Butterfinger and Quaker Oats, that have gone online for a little re-invigoration and re-invention. Old Spice, your father’s navy-themed under-arm fragrance, is among our favorites. They’ve done a brilliant TV, online and social media campaign in the last few years, lead by friend of Yahoo!, Iain Tait of Wieden + Kennedy. According to ClickZ, the campaign “ending” lead to 35.7 million views on YouTube alone. Not bad. Take that as a lesson creativity, agencies.

B2B built for social
Social media is often thought of as a B2C channel. That actually may be wrong, according to BNET Advertising’s British correspondent, Yann Gourvennec. Using social media, says Gourvennec, companies can build tight communities with their customer bases. She offers several tips on just how.

— 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

Goal! The comScore numbers prove what Paul the Octopus could have predicted—Yahoo! Sports World Cup was the US leader in FIFA World Cup coverage for three consecutive weeks.

The combination of great coverage, exclusive contributions from David Beckham, bloggers, Yahoo! Fantasy World Cup, special Yahoo! World Cup Toolbar, and the Yahoo! Penalty Shootout game ensured that fans could got their entire soccer fix all in one place. And did we mention David Beckham?

Several other Yahoo! properties also took the trophy in their respective categories, according to June 2010 US comScore data. To choose just three, Yahoo! Movies took over its group’s top spot for the first time and grew its audience by 11.3 percent month over month. Entertainment news is still ruled by omg! with over 25 million users. Yahoo! Finance is still the undisputed leader in Finance News/Research, reaching over 46 percent of that category’s users.

On top of all that, Yahoo! Network retained the No. 1 rank in comScore’s Ad Network report, putting the Yahoo! Network ahead of both its main competitors. Overall search volume grew by 7.1 percent, boosting US market share to 18.9 percent in June (up from 18.3 in May).

June was a great month for Yahoo! in other ways, too. Over 96 million people use Yahoo! Mail, for instance, making it the most popular such service by far. That holds true even when people are on the go, since more consumers use Yahoo! Mail on their mobile devices than any of its competitors.

— Chris Marlowe

Social and search, together at last
The world is indeed getting smaller and smaller. The worlds of social media advertising and search advertising are merging, and fast. Luckily, there are tools you can use to measure your performance in both worlds at once, says Laurie Sullivan on MediaPost’s SearchBlog.

Is social media corporate blogging’s death knell?
True, we’ve had a few positive things to say about corporate blogging now and then. We’re doing it right now, after all. But we may be dinosaurs before we know it. Simon Mainwaring, who, not incidentally, has been featured on our blog recently, says on his blog that they are going out of style and offers eight teasers on how “the online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the Web.” Dude, this is all so self-reflexive.

Millenials grow up on social media
Millenials. Gen-Y. Generation Next. “The kids these days.” Call ‘em what you will. Fact is, the young folk born in the 1980s and ‘90s are leading the charge in social media and, moreover, are unlikely to get sick of Facebook and Twitter—and whatever it is that will come two years down the pike to replace ’em—well into middle age, according to a recent Pew study. Agencies take note.

Yahoo! Tower of Babel
Ever wonder how Yahoo!—with many sites in many languages around the globe—gets to know its users? Yahoo! Web Analytics, which recently celebrated its second birthday, has the answers—answers that smart advertisers can benefit from.

Wise guy
Speaking of analytics, in his new role as CEO of MediaBank, former Yahoo! GM, Bill Wise, opines on AdExchanger.com on how technology and analytics can help manage your media efforts. We love our analytics here at Yahoo!, as Bill well knows. Kudos to our old friend, Bill, and best of luck with the new venture. We’re sure to be working together in the future.

Is your agency in a media tizzy?
Writing in Adotas, film director, Ernie Mosteller talks about the frenzy in the market today, what with all the different kinds of media customers have to choose from. “Media and creative are now a maze of micro-strategies and mini-tactics that each work differently for different types of people, depending, of course, on time of day and whether the sun is shining,” he writes. “The fact is, there are just too many different types of media out there to focus a crystal ball on what will work for a given brand, and how.” The key to success? Good content—which is still king.

— Michael Mattis

(Marble image by seeks2dream via Flickr, CC 2.0)