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.

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

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

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)

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.

The latest version of Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop launched recently. You provided us with feedback during our Beta and in webinar surveys. Our product folks listened, and they thought that these new features might assist you in your attempt to be efficient as well as productive:

• Select Excluded Keywords. Let’s say you’re selling plasma televisions at your electronics store. You may not want your ads to show when searchers enter “astrophysical plasma” or “blood plasma”. Selecting these terms as excluded keywords from the new Excluded Keywords tab in Search Marketing Desktop’s data grid can prevent your ads from displaying for these terms.
• Switch between Accounts. Do you manage more than one account? Now, you can switch between those accounts by clicking on Get Account, and then selecting the Switch button.
• Download Specific Campaigns. It is no longer necessary to download all of your account’s campaigns when you only want to make changes to one or two campaigns. Campaigns that you have not downloaded are displayed in the Get Account/Campaigns popup window with a blue icon.

— The Team

It’s a fact: The world is going mobile and shifting to an app-based universe—fast. And Yahoo! is shifting right along with it. Today, we’re pleased to announce a plethora of new mobile apps designed especially for Yahoo! users on Android, iPhone and iPod Touch devices, using advanced HTML5.

These new apps will let Yahoo’s 600 million users connect with the people they like the best and the stuff they want the most in totally new ways, from just about anywhere, when using Android, iPhone or iPod Touch gear. For more detail on the benefits of these releases, click over to the Yahoo! Mobile blog.

— The Team