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

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

As Yahoo! continues to work closely with Microsoft to implement the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we want to call out some important updates and tips to help ensure the best transition experience for you.

Organic search update and tips
A key aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is the transition of Yahoo! organic search listings (those found on the main body of the page). Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.

If organic search is important to your business, here are three valuable tips to help make sure you’re prepared:

1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

For more on the organic search transition, see the FAQ’s for self-service advertisers at the Yahoo! Transition Center.

Organic and paid search testing
Transitioning complex systems with quality requires a lot of testing, and we’re in the process of doing just that. Fortunately, there’s nothing you need to do, though there are a few things you should keep in mind: In mid-July, we began testing the delivery of organic results from Bing to Yahoo! Search, which may gradually increase to up to 25% of Yahoo! Search traffic. We also began testing the delivery of paid search results from Microsoft Advertising adCenter to Yahoo! Search, which began with a small percentage of traffic and may increase to include up to 2.5% to 3.5% of live Yahoo! Search traffic in the U.S. Please note that testing volumes will fluctuate during this period. Since the traffic percentages are small, advertisers should not draw any conclusions from what they observe during these tests, as the results may not be indicative of the future marketplace with full Yahoo! volume.

New editorial guidelines to take effect in August
There have been numerous questions from advertisers, wondering whether certain types of editorial content—such as gambling and contests—will be permitted once the transition takes place. To that end, Yahoo! and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines that will begin taking effect for both Yahoo! and Microsoft paid search advertisers in early August. It’s best to review them now.

You can do that here.

Mobile update
As part of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, Yahoo’s mobile organic and paid search results will soon be powered by Microsoft in the U.S. The transition is expected to coincide with the online organic and paid search timing. And, as with all Yahoo! Search experiences, Yahoo! will continue to innovate and enhance the overall consumer experience around those core listings. Once this transition is complete, you’ll be able to manage both your Yahoo! Search and Microsoft mobile campaigns from a single platform, adCenter. For more, take a look at the mobile FAQs on the Yahoo! Transition Center.

Transitioning with quality
We know that the holiday season is important to you. It’s important to us. While we’ve made good progress toward our goal of a quality transition for advertisers in the U.S. and Canada this year, as we’ve mentioned before, we may defer this transition until after the 2010 holiday season, if we believe that it will improve the overall experience.

More Alliance info from the Yahoo! Advertising blog

• Preparing for the Transition to adCenter
• More Questions and Answers about the Search Alliance
• Search Alliance Update #2
• Questions and Answers about the adCenter Integration
• New Alliance Heralds New Opportunities

— The Team

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

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

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

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

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

Combining scale with the convenience of a single platform, the Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance can help advertisers reach more consumers more easily. This new video illustrates how.

For more, visit SearchAlliance.com.

— The Team

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)

Myth: Traditional media is dead. 
Fact: Convergence is a reality. 

A new study conducted for Yahoo! by the most trusted source in media measurement, Nielsen, demonstrates significant growth in media multi-tasking with more users focusing attention on the Internet. In early 2010, Nielsen gave Yahoo! the exclusive opportunity to survey their Convergence Panel homes (where single-source measurement of in-home TV and Internet usage is being tested) and match behavioral data to survey findings. The result? The American Media Multi-Tasker Study.

5 Nielsen study findings that Yahoo! advertisers can leverage 

Study Finding: Three out of four Americans simultaneously multi-task with TV and Internet.

Key Advertiser Takeaway: Simultaneous use of TV & Internet is not only common, it is frequent and growing. 50 percent engage in simultaneous use daily and time spent multi-tasking has grown nearly 20 percent year-to-year. Behavior has changed significantly in the last year and doesn’t show any signs of stopping. Advertisers can leverage this trend by more closely tying online buys to TV buys.

Study Finding: More than one-half of multitaskers (54 percent) say that the Internet is the primary focus of their attention.

Key Advertiser Takeaway: For multitaskers, attention tends to be focused on the Internet, not TV. This is consistent across all age groups and gender. Advertisers can capitalize on this growing audience by targeting their online buys during traditional TV prime time.

Study Finding: Simultaneous use of Internet is typically unrelated to TV programs or commercials though simultaneous usage was lower during scripted dramas and comedies, as well as game and talk shows.

Key Advertiser Takeaway: Use of Internet while watching TV generally has little to do with the TV content. And internet behavior while multi-tasking closely reflects general internet behavior with The Big 3 Internet sites (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook) emerging as the top destinations. This means a healthy online advertising mix is the safest bet for advertisers looking to leverage simultaneous consumption.

Study Finding: Women are more likely to multi-task than men.
 
Key Advertiser Takeaway: Women are smarter than men. Just kidding. But seriously, if your target audience is women, increasing your investment online could be one the smartest advertising moves you can make.

Study Finding: Audiences aged 18-34 years are multi-tasking to the greatest extent (84 percent). Compare that to 78 percent of 35-49 year olds and 66 percent of those aged over 50. 

Key Advertiser Takeaway: This finding isn’t too surprising to anyone who has watched a twentysomething text, hold a conversation and maybe even drive at the same time. What is surprising is the high percentage of older age groups that also move fluidly between TV and the Internet. Advertisers need to keep this in mind when leveraging demographic targeting online.

For more on The American Media Multi-Tasker Study, go to Yahoo! Advertising, or read this article in USA Today.

— Dianne Molina