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

There are some things we never get tired of talking about. Take online ratings, for instance. Once again the numbers show Yahoo! sites at the number one spot in seven different categories.

We know we said the same thing last month, and many times before that, and it’s still true. If you want to check out the top-ranked sites in their respective fields, you simply have to join everyone else on Yahoo! Sports, News, Shopping, Finance, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Local and omg!

Green goes up
Special congratulations this month go to Yahoo! Green, which grew more than 300 % and jumped from No. 5 rank in February to the No. 1 Green site in the U.S. in March. It’s no wonder, since everyone trying to live a more responsible lifestyle appreciates its engaging blend of news, commentary and practical information.

Overall, the online population continues to grow, showing an 11.6 % increase over this time last year. Yahoo! sites reach 73.7% of these Americans. In fact, Yahoo! sites are responsible for over 10% of total time spent online in the U.S. Advertising reflects this, too. Impressions/page views for Yahoo! Network were up 3% in comScore’s Ad Network report, while our competitors declined or remained flat.

We also turned up some interesting factoids from comScore World Metrix, the data from which all of these numbers are drawn. Outside of North America, for instance, Yahoo! has the largest audience for Sports in Europe, Homepage in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, and Finance in Europe and Middle East/Africa.

— Chris Marlowe

Well, the rain finally came in the last hours of ad:tech’s annual San Francisco conference, but it didn’t dampen the spirits of attendees who stuck around until the conclusion of Wednesday’s sessions.

The Ad Blog attended several of these sessions throughout the day, beginning with the “Marketing Masters: Branded Online Publications” in the temporary theater set up on the exhibit floor. We first heard from Babette Pepaj, Founder of the social networking site BakeSpace.com, who described how the small idea of creating a meeting place for people to share recipes has grown into something much larger and dynamic. BakeSpace members regularly plan weekend get-togethers, and the site works with media providers like ABC to promote recipes for dishes served by the ladies in “Desperate Housewives,” such as “Susan’s Caribbean Chimichangas.”

Pepaj was followed by Yahoo! Marketing Development Manager Rick Rutter, who spoke on Yahoo!’s wide variety of branded content, which includes both sponsored videos and webisodes, as well as non-video web content on one of our properties. Yahoo!’s strength in branded content, Rutter said, was a perfect example of “Science + Art + Scale” in action: the content itself falling into the Art bucket, taking advantage of the Scale Yahoo! provides (and few other adverting providers can).

In fact, Rutter showed a particularly illuminating slide that detailed how today’s top-rated prime-time network TV shows only receive a third of the overall rating that the top shows of 30 years garnered. “Size matters when you’re deciding who to work with,” explained Rutter, which leads many advertisers to Yahoo! for stronger, more cost-efficient engagement with consumers.

Partnering with best content producers in the business—Electus, Reveille and Group M—Yahoo! is creating content that is perfectly aligned with what our advertisers’ brands want to do. “We really focus on integrating a brand in meaningful ways, not just screaming brand,” said Rutter. He further explained that Yahoo!’s insights about search traffic patterns help us program better; for example, we know that searches for food recipes spike after 4:00 p.m. each day, so that’s the time to get food-related content front and center.

Rutter bragged (just a little) that Yahoo!’s “Prime Time in No Time” is the most watched original web program on the ‘Net, with 308 million streams to date and 6.9 million unique monthly users. After the recent American Music Awards, which drew an audience of 14.2 million people on ABC, “PTiNT” almost equaled that number when 12.1 million watched its AMA recap episode.

Location-Based Advertising Myths and Realities
Later Wednesday, we attended a very interesting session that discussed the opportunities in mobile advertising that targets consumers based on where they are or where they’re going. Opening with the argument that it’s actually been around 100 years (roadside billboards for nearby restaurants), Norwest Venture Partners General Partner Jeff Crowe identified three current “hotspots” for location-based ads: 1) Maps as a template for local search, 2) Social networks connecting people with their favorite places, and 3) The general availability of user location data.

Crowe admitted that “all of this is in very early stages,” but pointed to the new iPhone 4.0 platform—in which user location is constantly relayed in the background to the phone’s apps for incorporation into content—as part of a fast-moving sub-industry. He predicts a growing acceptance of “mapvertising,” in which ads are built into maps, and “geo-fences,” where a user is delivered a particular ad message when he or she gets within a certain radius of a local business.

Additionally, navigation applications like the Tomtom or Garmin will shift from subscription to advertising-based models, says Crowe. Wrapping, up he identified geo-retargeting in online advertising as the “Holy Grail” of local-based advertising.

— Jeff Hecox

Those “Mad Men” are such dolls
AdAge reports, via the New York Times, that Mattel will introduce a line of “Mad Men” action figures—or perhaps “inaction figures” would be the more appropriate term. The line will include Don Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway. Some ad execs apparently don’t like the idea, or the show, all that much. Writes AdAge’s Ken Wheaton, “I guess I’d be ticked off if the work of my younger days was swiped or, worse, bashed in a TV show. And if I weren’t, in fact, a booze-soaked lout myself, I might be miffed that the show portrays the entire industry as drunken, oversexed womanizers.” C’mon, Ken. Lighten up, buddy. The three-martini lunch is on us next time. 

Bing on the up and up
By now you’ve no doubt heard about the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search alliance. There have been a lot of questions about it, naturally. But it looks like we’ve chosen a good ally. Microsoft’s Bing showed a 15 percent increase in traffic last month over January’s numbers, says Neilsen. Thanks to Search Engine Land for this intelligence.   

Agencies’ “consultant phobia” unfounded
Agencies have feared the encroachment on their turf by big consultancies for years. But says, BNET Advertising’s Jim Edwards, they need not worry. He states, “While clients may periodically swoon in [consultancies’] presence, they ultimately return to agencies when they actually need to get the job done. The lesson here is that specialization and good old-fashioned inertia can actually be an agency’s friend.”

Just what is behavioral targeting?
It’s one of the hottest things going right now—and it’s expected to grow from more than 26 percent this year over last year, according to ClickZ’s Amy Manus. But what it is it and, more importantly, what is it not?

Are Brit ads better that Yank ones?
Maybe, says BNET Advertising’s Jim Edwards. But there are pretty sound reasons why, and they’re not all good ones. Creativity is almost enforced, he says, by “the U.K.’s often comically restrictive advertising rules.”

Creative Spotlight: BBDO’s St. Pat’s Day responsible drinking PSA

It’s definitely St. Patrick’s Day. Just saw a man in a Kelly green “Utilikilt” saunter down the street. Fortunately for onlookers he had the gams for it. Anyway, BBDO, in what is both a celebration of the kiss-me-I’m-Irish holiday and a warning about  the potential dangers of looking at the world through your beer goggles, has just come out with a PSA campaign that features cans of Guinness stout with blurry lettering. Tip o’ the Tam o’ Shanter to AdFreak’s Tim Nudd for his gift ‘o the gab on this one.

— Michael O’Mattis

In an informal conversation at the 4A’s conference, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz says that only Yahoo! can offer everything advertisers need for successful digital advertising: science, art and scale.

Yahoo! can bring advertisers a combination of strengths that no one else can, Yahoo! CEO  Carol Bartz said in a keynote speech at the 4A’s Transformation 2010 conference today, because only Yahoo! offers them three things: science, art and scale.

Carol, speaking to the advertising industry group in San Francisco, said, “We want Yahoo! to be the partner you turn to for answers and solutions, and most importantly—when you want results.” By providing science, art and scale, Yahoo can help advertisers and agencies master online advertising.

Science
“Science is incredibly important,” Carol said. “Without it, we’re all flying blind.” She said it’s even more important because the Internet is moving so fast that it’s creating chaos for advertisers. In order to help advertisers sort through that information, Yahoo! can advertisers better insights, better data, and better targeting. “This means less wasted impressions and a better ability to reach your audience,” Carol said.

Carol cited a recent study Yahoo! did with a brick-and-mortar retailer that tracked the effect of online ads on more than million consumers. While everyone involved in the study expected that online ads would drive online buying, the study found that 93% of the effect of the ads caused offline purchases. And every ad dollar spent drove $10 in purchases. She added that we’re looking at insights to improve the brand experience online for brands that have traditionally spent money only on television.

Art
Science needs to be coupled with the tools to be as creative as you want to be. “Art in online advertising is about more than a banner ad. It’s about a better canvas,” Carol said. “Our commitment is to create engaging content, and we want to work with you to create engaging ads.”

Yahoo! can offer engaging ad formats, including new display ads and branded video content. Yahoo! is currently monetizing 85% of its video, Carol said, and looks to be adding more video content. Carol unveiled a new program, called Digital AdVentures, which will let advertisers and agencies work directly with Yahoo! to develop innovative ad formats. “We want to put a bit of Yahoo! purple, a bit of the exclamation point into your advertising,” Carol said.

Scale
Yahoo! can offer advertisers more than 600 million people who visit us every month, but Carol pointed out that it’s not just raw numbers that we offer—it’s our engaged users. “We can find passion groups for you at scale,” Carol said. “We can find audiences for you at scale.” Yahoo! users around the world spend nearly 100 billion minutes a month on the Yahoo! network. While these users are spending all this time on our sites, we are tracking their intent, and can use this data to help advertisers.

To illustrate how advertisers can use Yahoo!’s science, art and scale, Carol described a recent deal with Walmart, the largest retailer in the world. Yahoo! worked with Walmart to deliver its messages across our network. This is Walmart’s single biggest digital advertising initiative with an online publisher, and it was able to reach its target audience at a huge scale. Each month, Yahoo! will help Walmart reach an estimated 23 million moms, an average of 5.6 times. More than 7 out of 10 online moms will see this marketing message in an average month. “We are able to deliver on Walmart’s objectives in a way that few can,” Carol said.

The speech was billed as a no-holds-barred discussion with a notoriously outspoken executive, but Carol said she was trying to be on her best behavior. In fact, she self-bleeped some of her own sentences. “The California Assembly has designated this a no-swear week,” Carol said. “So I don’t want to cuss in case I get arrested!”

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

This is the last of a three-part series on teen behavior online. For Part One, click here. For Part Two, click here.

We already know that teens—boys and girls aged 12 to 17—are online in massive numbers, with 97 percent of the U.S.’s nearly 25 million teens spending an average of 18.5 hours a month on the Internet.

But what do teens do with all that time online? Well, for one thing, they love their games. According to one eMarketer report, 78 percent of online teens in the U.S. play games online—all kinds of them, from massive multi-player fantasies like World of Warcraft to simple racing games and shoot ’em ups. Teens also love instant messaging, with 68 percent swapping stories in quick soundbites. And they are highly engaged by social media: According to eMarketer, 58 percent of teens have a social network profile (though 66 percent of teen girls have a profile vs. 50 percent for boys).

Teens and social media
OK, so teens are getting social online. So what? Well, some conventional wisdom says that the Internet is making people anti-social. But we think that’s a myth, and new research shows that the Internet fosters a sense of community among teens. In fact, says eMarketer, 14.9 million teens used social networks in 2008. By 2013, that number is expected to rise to 17.9 million.

Keeping in touch is vital to today’s teens. The same report says that 91 percent of teens using social media sites use them to stay in touch with friends; 72 percent use them to make plans with their pals, and 49 percent make new friends via social media sites. (And that doesn’t just go for teens. In fact, the author of this post—26 years past his teens—has made many friends online, and has even been to a formal dinner at London’s oldest restaurant, Rules, with people he met via social media.)

Teens and games
As we noted above, 78 percent of teens online play games online. But, according to a Pew study, games appear to matter more to boys than to girls, with 39 percent of boys saying they are daily gamers vs. just 22 percent for girls. According to the same study, 80 percent of those boys play five or more different game genres. The most popular game genres include racing, puzzles, sports-related games and action/adventure games. Where do teens play these games? Forty-eight percent play on mobile devices, 60 percent play on other portable devices, 73 percent play on computers, and 86 percent play on consoles.

So what’s the upshot for advertisers? Well, for one thing, you’ve got to go where your audience is. Investing now in social media and games is probably a good bet for capturing customers now that you may have for a lifetime. Second, you’ve got to appeal to teens’ broader sense of community. They’re not the selfish, texting-happy little twerps they’re sometimes shown to be on TV. In fact, teens today have a very powerful sense of connectedness and responsibility to their communities.

Yahoo! reaches 72 percent of online U.S. teens. They spend nine percent of all their time online with us. Through services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, Yahoo! Games, as well as our alliances with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, Yahoo! has become more essential than ever to teens’ daily lives.

For more information on how you can promote your business among America’s largest and most engaged online audience, visit Yahoo! Advertising.

—Michael Mattis, the “Dick Clark of Blogging”

Sources:
eMarketer: Kids and Teens: Growing Up Virtual, May, 2009
eMarketer: Teens on Social Networks, April .,2009
eMarketer,: Kids and Teens Communication Revolutionaries, Nov., 2008
Pew/Internet: Fresh Demographics on Teen and Adult Game Play & How Games May Teach Kids to be Good Citizens, March, 2009

(Image by inno’vision via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Many of you have both Display and Sponsored Search campaigns. For our Sponsored Search customers, we’re offering a free webinar that explores two important features of Sponsored Search: Network Distribution, which allows you to target marketing campaigns to the entire Yahoo! Network, and Import Campaigns, which lets you import your Google AdWords campaign data into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. For more detail on both these features, visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog. Or, to register, click on the link below.

When: Thursday, Feb. 4, 2009, 11 A.M., Pacific Time
Where: The Internet—go here to register. Note that  you will need the password you created when you registered for Sponsored Search. Don’t already have a Sponsored Search account? Click here.
Why: Because it’s great stuff to know for improving your campaigns and results through Sponsored Search

Ah, the kids these days. They’ve been pilloried and misunderstood—and striven to be understood—by their elders even before James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo portrayed them with such affection in “Rebel Without a Cause.”

But today’s teens (those aged 12 to 17) not only have tremendous buying power, they also have dramatic influence over what goes on online. In 2008, teens represented nearly 25 million people in the U.S. alone, according to MRI, and, says a report by TRUStudy, pumped some $127 billion into the U.S. economy last year. In fact, according to a recent study published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, today’s youths spend about seven-and-a-half hours with electronic media each day.

Put your arithmetic cap on, because we’re going to run a few numbers past you.

Key teen facts (2008)

• 19.9 million: Total U.S. teens online (MRI).
• 97: Percentage of U.S. teens online, the most online of any age demographic (MRI).
• 10: Percentage of the total U.S. online population consisting of teens (comScore).
• 368.4 million: Total hours spent online monthly by U.S. teens—18.5 hours average per visitor, per month (comScore).
• 23: Percentage increase in the average amount of time spent online per week by U.S. teens, from Autumn 2005 to Autumn 2008 (SRI).

That’s a pretty impressive market. So where does Yahoo! fit into all of this? We thought you’d never ask.

Teens on Yahoo!

The fact is, Yahoo! has a very strong position for advertisers who want to reach the teen audience. Here are some more facts and figures, courtesy of comScore.

• 14.4 million: The number of U.S. teens on Yahoo! in April 2009.
• 2.2: The average number of hours spent on Yahoo! per month per U.S. teen visitor.
• 52: The percentage of U.S. teens online that the Yahoo! front page reaches.
• 17: Average number of monthly visits to Yahoo! per teen visitor.
• 9: The percentage of time online that U.S. teens spend with Yahoo!

In short, if you are trying to reach teens, Yahoo! is a great place to be. Want to know where your teens are? Yahoo! offers an industry-leading demographic targeting solution to help you target specific messages to your most important audiences, including teens. For more, visit the Demographic Targeting page on Yahoo! Advertising.

Next time: What teens want online, and how you can help them get it.

Sources:
MRI: TwelvePlus, 2008
TRUStudy: Teens, Spring 2008
comScore: Media Metrix, April, 2009
SRI: Knowledge Networks, MultiMedia Scan, Fall 2005 vs. Fall 2008 Based on Teens 12-17

— Michael Mattis

(Image by mikebaird via Flickr, CC 2.0)

“The check is in the mail. “

We’ve all heard that one. But now it just might be true for advertisers, with Yahoo! Mail’s new, upgraded features and ad units.

More for users
Our new features make America’s number one email service, with an engaged audience of more than 100 million monthly users, even more attractive. New Open Applications make it easier for users to do essential stuff like sending cash via PayPal, share and edit photos, store big files, manage invitations, get birthday reminders, view updates from friends without having to visit other social media sites, IM and send SMS messages and other cool stuff. (For deets, see the Yahoo! Mail blog.

Naturally, making Yahoo! Mail more attractive for users makes it more attractive to you, the advertiser—de facto.

But we’re not done yet.

More for advertisers
Yahoo! Mail advertisers have let their needs be known—and we’ve listened. For one thing, you wanted bigger, bolder and brighter. And we’ve given you that across the board. Here’s a sample of what Yahoo! Mail advertisers can expect:

Tandem Ads—These new, synched, multi-unit ads, capable of incorporating animation, floating rich media and streaming video, get your message across, fast. Includes both 728×90 and 300×250 ad units and appears in both New and Classic Yahoo! Mail. You may have read about them previously during the co-sponsored Yahoo!-Ad Council “Create for a Cause: A Digial Contest for Good.”  (Congrats again, Publicis!)

Classic and New Mail Inbox Takeover—In one fell swoop you can own the inbox. The Inbox Takeover allows you to advertise to both audiences with dynamic, rich media and highly targetable ads.  Includes 728×90, 160 x 600 and 180 x 150 ad units across Classic and New Yahoo! Mail.

Monster Streaming Video Ads—What do users do in between tasks after, say, sending an e-mail or emptying folders? Watch your clever video ad, that’s what. These large (300 x 600 or 425 x 600), rich and best-of-breed ads appear in both New and Classic Yahoo! Mail, next to social updates for added relevance. 

Classic Mail Text Links—These highly affordable and fully targetable ads can reach more than 60 million monthly Yahoo! Classic Mail users  in the U.S. with a simple, compelling, two-line, 30-character ad with a 25 x 25 accompanying image.

So check out our new mail ads.