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

Did you know that nearly as many Internet users respond to online display advertising by performing a search on a search engine (27 percent) as those who simply click on the ad itself (31 percent)? That’s just one of the data points included in the new white paper from Yahoo!, “Better Together:  Search and Display.”

Advertisers tend to separate their digital advertising into two flavors: they generally think of search advertising for performance marketing and turn to display for branding. It’s easy to see why most advertisers take this approach, since each channel plays a unique role in any given campaign.

But in practice, search advertising coupled with display advertising yields better results than when used independently. 

Download the paper here.

This statistical reality is one of the reasons Rich Ads in Search are so effective, too. Yahoo!’s innovative ad format allows advertisers to include video, custom search boxes, logos or images alongside a traditional text search ad, bringing together the virtues of both search and display.

— Chris Marlowe

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.

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

When you serve a wide variety of people with an even wider variety of services, how do you know which products and messages will work in a marketing campaign? Mont-Tremblant, in the Laurentian region of Quebec, used Yahoo! Smart Ads to dynamically generate customized display ads that connected with its customers. These “smarter” campaigns also revealed some surprising information about its vacationers.

The Challenge
Voted best ski resort in Canada’s Northeast by Ski Magazine 14 years running, the Tremblant resort is an elegant leisure-time complex and village in Quebec with picturesque mountains. The region is thus primarily known for world-class skiing. However, Mont-Tremblant also boasts a few 4 1/2-star golf courses, relaxing spas, 5-star hotels, intimate B&Bs, events, fine dining, a casino and a host of other activities.

Mont-Tremblant’s tourism board wanted to increase bookings for its partner properties in its primary U.S. target market which account for some 40 percent of its business during the winter. For the online marketing campaign, the tourism board wanted to specifically target the greater Boston area and the surrounding New England states. Marketing was a difficult task as Mont-Tremblant offered such a wide variety of activities and deals with different consumers wanting different vacation packages.

The Solution
Mont-Tremblant turned to Yahoo! to increase its bookings through an online presence and to find the optimal marketing message for its vacationers. In the past, the tourism board primarily used a blend of traditional print advertising including newspapers, magazines and billboards to reach its customers, with limited efforts on the Internet.

“Tourism is the perfect industry for selling online because we can develop targeted messages, create great visuals and promote last minute specials,” says Alain Houde, General Manager for Tourism Mont-Tremblant.

Yahoo! Smart Ads was the ideal display solution for Mont-Tremblant to showcase its wide variety of activities and deals. Using Smart Ads technology, Yahoo! could combine various ad elements based on response rates to the campaign, allowing it to optimize ads on the fly and show prospects the most relevant vacation deals based on a combination of visuals, messages, calls-to-action and targeting.
 
One ad, for example, offered visuals of a Mont-Tremblant ski vacation with a call-to-action for flights while another used spa imagery with a call-to-action for hotel rooms. Mont-Tremblant also combined geo-targeting with the Smart Ads solution to pinpoint customers in the greater Boston and New England region.

The Results 
Mont-Tremblant’s Smart Ads click-through rate (CTR), for its most successfully optimized ad, outperformed comparable traditional travel display campaigns by over 200%, according to Yahoo! internal data. The campaign ran over a period of a month and a half.

“Having never run such a campaign, we didn’t really know what to expect,” says Houde. “We were very pleased with the results.”

As an added bonus, Mont-Tremblant uncovered some startling data about its customers.

“We’ve traditionally focused our marketing efforts around our ski deals. But with the Smart Ads campaign, the spa packages actually outperformed the ski packages. It was totally unexpected,” notes Houde. “The Smart Ads data has given us really great insight into what our customers want and that perhaps that we should focus more on a variety of services. We will also use this insight about the spa and ski packages in our marketing strategy, both offline and online, to appeal to a more female demographic.”

With an overall more targeted marketing mix that has shifted to roughly 50% online compared to 30% online in past years, and an emphasis on Smart Ads, Mont-Tremblant increased its fall and winter bookings by 66 percent in the Boston/New England area over the previous year.

“Going from offline to online has been very successful for us and we are very happy with the Smart Ads performance,” says Houde. “We are now considering a Smart Ads campaign for our summer season.”

About Smart Ads: Yahoo! Smart Ads combines advanced targeting and optimization technologies with a customizable template to dynamically create and serve the most relevant ads to consumers based on a variety of targeting data. For example, for a travel advertiser, Smart Ads can match a golf package to one consumer and a beach package to another consumer based on several data inputs including age, gender, geography and behavioral interests. The various combinations of ad elements can result in tens of thousands of different creative executions.

For more on Yahoo! Smart Ads, visit Yahoo! Advertising.

About Mont-Tremblant: Located in the Laurentian region of Quebec, Mont-Tremblant is a world class resort area with picturesque mountains, lakes, villages and golf courses.

— Christine Tseng and Michael Mattis

In part three of our series on launching into online advertising, we look at strategies when it comes to buying ad placements. See part one, “Getting Started in Display,” and part two, “Display Ads Go Viral.”

Recently a major big box retailer of home appliances commissioned a study on customer behavior. It found that if people shopped at its store first, they ended up purchasing something 70 percent of the time. “A close rate of 70 percent on a first-time shopper is pretty amazing on a product that’s a couple thousand dollars,” says Michael Nuzzo, who worked with the client.

But if the customer visited the store second or third, the close rate plummeted to just 20 percent. The company brought this data to its meeting with its advertising agency, and the information proved invaluable when planning a new online ad campaign. The ensuing buying strategy focused on frequency above all else.

“With this client,” recalls Nuzzo, “you always want to be in front of the customers; you never want to take time off and let a competitor say, ‘Shop us first.’ We were live in front of appliance shoppers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” To do that, Nuzzo purchased extensive placement on ad networks for their reach and efficiency.

The right media at the right time
Buying ad placement on the Internet involves allocating a marketing budget across different channels, weighing one more heavily than another based on what you’re trying to accomplish. A combination of reach and target marketing, says Nuzzo, currently director of sales and operations for Boston-based Collective, a technology solutions provider for display advertising, can be achieved via the three main channels of online advertising: Portals, ad networks, and site-specific buys.

Spot-on means being site-specific
Site-specific buys are best for highly targeted niche marketing. They are an important part of any buying strategy because they bring a specific audience presumably interested in your product or service. Site-specific buys also are also a cost-efficient way to purchase large spaces—even whole-page takeovers—that would be cost prohibitive with a portal. “Because you get more real estate, you have more opportunity to showcase the product,” says Nuzzo.

Ad networks are great for delivering audiences based on data. They are usually less expensive than site-specific buys, and are also great for direct response. Ad networks extend reach in a cost-effective way, but can also be highly targeted. While a site-specific buy will only reach a consumer when she’s on a certain site, an ad network can ensure she’s exposed to your ad throughout an entire day of browsing. 

The power of portals
Portals—such as Yahoo!, AOL and MSN—have become hugely powerful in their ability to hit both large numbers and specific demographics. “Portals have the ability to deliver almost everything at this point,” says Nuzzo. “Their bag of tools is vast.” Yahoo!, for example, efficiently targets users based on registration and other data, and is a trusted news and content source, and also has a search function, another way of placing ads. Yahoo! can also create custom content for clients, such as the Yahoo! Sports Minute on behalf of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Portals offer maximum reach, an important part of any buying strategy. “Reach is important because not everyone is going to be clicking on a banner ad,” explains Nuzzo. “But they might see it and do little with it in the online space, but go to a store tomorrow and buy the product.”

The industry you’re in will largely determine whether your budget is weighted more for reach or for niche. For the travel and financial planning industries it’s better to target market, while retail, electronics and wireless service are best served by hitting as many users as possible. “The more common the product is, the easier it is to do broad reach,” says Nuzzo. “TVs, computers and cell phones are everywhere, but not everyone is going to be taking a vacation next week.”

And whether to go big or small, to make a big splash over a short duration or trickle out a more modest but lengthier campaign, depends on your goals and the size of your marketing budget. “There’s no golden rule,” says Marc Grabowski, head of North American mid-market display advertising for Yahoo! “It’s a matter of assessing your goals and determining if your budget is really going to allow you to reach those goals.”

A movie release is a good example of big but short. “With something like a movie, there’s a much greater benefit in going really big for a one-day period,” says Grabowski. “That’s different than doing the launch of a product that is staged over a couple of weeks across the country, where it makes sense to stage the campaign to have a lasting presence.”

— Christian Chensvold

Christian Chensvold is a New York-based writer covering business, lifestyle and culture. Visit his blog, Ivy Style.

In part two of our four-part primer on getting started in online display, we look at some of the latest trends and innovations in display advertising. View part one, “Planning and Strategy.”

A few years ago, Oregon residents logged onto the web to find an animated crab crawling across their browser window before making a home for himself inside the four walls of a display ad.

It was a clever use of rich media at the time, recalls Andy Askren, but he isn’t sure it would play today. The ad was created by Askren, creative director of Portland-based advertising agency Grady Britton, for the coastal town of Newport. “At the time it was really successful,” he says, “but I wonder if it would be seen as cheesy today, whereas once it was innovative. The content in online ads has to constantly keep one-upping itself.”

When it comes to creating engaging content for online campaigns, advertising agencies have more tools to work with than ever before. They also have the pressure of trying to innovate in a field where innovation itself is humdrum. 

The catch-22 of innovation
The more innovative display ads get, the more accustomed users get to innovation—and the more quickly they get bored with things they’ve seen before (like those annoying dancing figures used to sell auto insurance, for example). “It seems like we’re headed toward an event horizon where there’s nothing we can do to make display ads more visible,” says Dayn Wilberding, Grady Britton’s director of digital culture. “People know how to tune out those boxes, so there has to be something in there that’s intriguing, interesting and shareable.”

Make your display ads sharable
Yes, you read that right: shareable display ads. Viral and social networking are now influencing the content of display advertising. “Social media is having a huge effect on the behavior of people and advertising, and how they react or don’t react to ads,” says Wilberding. “The sharability and viral effect is very top of mind in terms of how we’re creating ads these days.”

This means that today’s display ads are increasingly just one part of a much larger digital marketing campaign. “If there’s a trend for us,” explains Askren, “it’s that we’re finding more ways than ever to find that what’s in that box is connected to something else. No single box or message is going to deliver the client’s whole message, but will be part of another message to be continued elsewhere.”

Today’s interactive display ads may invite users to a Facebook page “or some other social application that forges a relationship with us, and that eventually leads to a sale,” says Wilberding.

Display is getting smarter
Display ads are also smarter than ever before. They notice the kinds of websites that users are browsing, and ad networks serve them a related suite of ads carefully targeted to the types of products and services in which they’re interested. 

Finally, ad agencies have finally realized that if users are reluctant to click on an ad, it may be because they don’t want to stop what they’re in the middle of doing. Online display ads are increasingly providing an experience that happens in the here and now, not somewhere else. “They now provide you with an experience that happens on the site you’re visiting,” says Askren, “because if you click the ad, you’re deciding not to do what you were doing before. We’re getting more intelligent about not taking users elsewhere, but offering them some sort of value that enhances what they’re already doing.”

Not just clicks, but memorable experiences—that’s what today’s most innovative ads are doing. “I don’t think anyone is thinking of the click-through as the ultimate conversion anymore,” says Askren.

A few memorable experiences from Yahoo! Advertising:

• Paramount’s Transformers
• In-game advertising
• Macy’s Yahoo! Smart Ads campaign

— Christian Chensvold

Christian Chensvold is a New York-based writer covering business, lifestyle and culture. Visit his blog, Ivy-Style.com.

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

Ever wonder what your home page would like if it were, well, a home? Yahoo! took over our own Yahoo! Front Page with a dynamic ad that visualizes the way we bring together all the reasons you love the Internet—within four walls, no less. Click on through to see how making Yahoo! your online home puts the best of everything —great entertainment, instant news, useful information, captivating content, relevant ads, e-mail, Instant Messaging and more—all within easy reach. Make the web your own with Yahoo!, the one place that brings Your World together with The World.

The takeover is just one part of the new Yahoo! branding campaign that will also show the power Yahoo! has to drive business and build brands. Watch for all of the other iterations rolling out now across all types of media.

— Chris Marlowe

Editor’s Note: With this post we kick off a four-part primer aimed at mid-sized businesses looking to begin advertising online. From the planning stage to the latest trends from top agency creatives, from buying strategies to using analytics to tweak your campaign in real time, you’ll learn why the web is usually the most efficient and targeted way to reach customers.

When a regional family restaurant chain decided to launch an ad campaign on Yahoo!, it had very specific goals. How specific? It wanted to build brand affinity and increase noontime purchase intent in specific geographies. 

In other words, it wanted office workers in certain zip codes to come chow down for lunch.

The company created banner ads targeting certain areas where it was looking to grow market share. An hour or two before lunch, ads with a clear call-to–action—such as two-for-one deals—went up on popular pages such as Yahoo! News, Sports and Mail. Six weeks later, the restaurant chain had achieved double-digit sales increases in the targeted zip codes.

The success of the campaign was largely due to the company’s clearly defined goals, says Marc Grabowski, who oversees North American mid-market display advertising for Yahoo! “Though it may seem obvious on the surface,” says Grabowski, “having clear goals are vital before launching any online ad campaign.”

For most companies, goals come down to either growing mindshare or selling product. And for either one, there are three things to bear in mind:

1. Know who you’re trying to reach
Whether suburban moms or males aged 18-34, you need to identify your target audience. “One of the great things about the Internet is the types of hyper-local targeting you can do,” says Grabowski.

Yahoo!, for example, uses a combination of user IP address, registration data and Universal Location Manager to target specific online demographics with 90 to 95 percent accuracy. “You can really own a specific market in a way you can’t do in television or print,” says Grabowski. While a newspaper’s circulation base may stretch for hundreds of miles, a car dealership might just want to hit consumers in the immediate neighborhood. “With the Internet, it’s possible to own 50% of the online ad exposures to a certain demographic.” That constant brand reinforcement gets you more bang for the buck.

2. Know how they use the Web
Next, you need to determine how your target audience uses the Internet. Do they use it primarily for news or for connecting with their peers? This information is vital for determining later steps, such as ad placement.

Also, bear in mind that the way people interact with the web is different from other media, so you can’t simply replicate a print campaign on the web. Consumers may be more likely to clip a newspaper coupon, for example, than print an online one. “You have to make sure the medium is appropriate for what you’re trying to do,” says Grabowski.

Which leads us to the final step in planning:

3. Know what you’re trying to accomplish
Once you’ve established who your target customers are and where to find them online, you need a firm sense of what you’re trying to achieve. The web is a great medium for increasing both brand awareness and purchase intent, but these two goals require different types of campaigns. Display ads are best for brand-building, while search ads are best for transactions and traffic, according to Adam Chandler, vice president of sales for PointRoll, a marketing services technology firm specializing in interactive rich media display, video, and mobile advertising.

“Define what you’re trying to accomplish as clearly as possible up front,” says Chandler, “and determine what your metrics of success will be.” Whether you want to simply generate more site traffic or get a video watched to create brand awareness, the more specific your goal, the easier it will be to measure your online ad campaign’s success.

— Christian Chensvold

Christian Chensvold is a New York-based writer covering business, lifestyle and culture. Visit his blog, Ivy Style.