A few weeks ago, we announced U.S. and E.U clearance for the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. This was, naturally, big news in the search marketing world. That post garnered some 60 comments from our engaged advertising and agency customers. Most of these comments were positive.

Understandably, some of you had questions and concerns about your accounts. But the most important fact for you to know regarding the search alliance is that, as noted in our FAQ’s:

We will begin with the algorithmic search transition, with a goal of completing transition of at least the U.S. market by the end of 2010. We also hope to make significant progress transitioning U.S. advertisers and publishers in 2010 prior to the crucial holiday season, but may wait until 2011 if we determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season. All global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.

For “the rest of the story,” as old Paul Harvey used to say, head on over to the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog. Good day!

— The Team

How do you quantify the success of your online video? It’s been a conundrum for a lot of advertisers for some time. But Yahoo! is here to help. We’ve just launched a new Yahoo! Web Analytics Blog. In the blog’s second post, Yahoo’s Tim Hampshire helps you figure the ins and outs of tallying the results of your video efforts.

We look forward to more analytics posts and will be linking to them frequently.

— The Team

Calling all bracketologists
March brings with it green beer, spring flowers and, of course, three weeks of hoops hysteria in the form of the NCAA college basketball tournament. This year’s Yahoo! Sports March Madness line-up is stronger than ever, beginning with our seasoned veteran, Tourney Pick ‘Em. The contest pits Yahoo! users against each other and the “experts,” with cash prizes of up to a million dollars on the line. Something new and cool for this year’s tournament is “Predictalot,” an experimental app from the brainiacs at Yahoo! Labs: Predictalot enables fans to make all types of prestidigitations, then assigns odds and lets users buy and sell them like stocks. Yahoo! has also created a dedicated mobile site just for your tournament picks, as well as a new web show, “Bracket Madness Live.” Picking begins this Sunday after the match-ups are announced, and the usual bracket-busting begins Thursday, March 18.

JWT’s top ten lessons recession brand lessons
Those JWT guys sure are into their “top tens.” The global agency spent a year surveying brand and consumer response to the recession, and came up with ten key brand lessons for surviving a downturn. And then they put them all in a book, which you can download for bupkis—well, in exchange for the usual name/rank/serial number data, anyway.

It’s not all about the data?
Yep, that’s what Dax Hamman says in AdExchanger.com’s Displaying Search column. Hamman, the VP of Display Media at iCrossing, says that “Search and analytics data has helped define media programs for some time…Data is essential to this evolution in media.” But, he also says, “As an industry we must remember that we are talking to real people, not just pixels, and real people will always respond better to something that is visually exciting, has sizzling copy or simply makes them say ‘wow’.” In short, creativity’s still king, kids.

Keep an eye on your agency
So much for the three-martini lunch. “In most businesses, advertising is an afterthought,” says BNET Advertising’s Jim Edwards. “It shouldn’t be.” Why? Because, he says, you need to know where your agency advertising dollars are going—are they going into your ads or into padding the expense accounts of your agency and its minions? Edwards explains in “Client Hell! BNET’s Guide to the Advertising Underworld.”

High Standards
It may still seem like the Wild West when it comes to digital advertising but, rest assured, the frontier days are over. Today we have high standards, as ClickZ’s Hollis Thomases explains.

2010 looking up for marketing execs
According to a recent survey of more than 400 North American marketing execs performed by the research firm Frost & Sullivan, marketing execs are viewing the glass as at least half full. Budgets remain flat, staffing and processes remain an issue, and the biggest challenge remains the global recession. But, nevertheless, marketers are finding that life can be so sweet on the sunny side of the street.

— Michael Mattis

(Hoops image by Ryan Fung via Flickr, CC 2.0)

How will the search agreement with Microsoft affect Yahoo! advertisers and products? David Pann, VP and general manager of search advertising, told WebProNews Video that the deal is “a win for advertisers with a single buy getting access to more inventory, it’s a win for consumers for a greater relevance, and it’s a win for consumers and publishers since they have greater access to a new set of participation and inventory.” For more from David, watch the video below.

More WebProNews Videos

—The Team

Editor’s Note: JWT’s Global Planning Director, Sean Boyle, was the bad-boy beau of the ball at the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) “Transforming Advertising” conference in San Francisco last week. With wit and an Irish gift-o’-the gab, Boyle presented his “The Stop-Start Ten Commandments”—five things agencies need to stop doing and five things they need to start doing. It made the room so pregnant with nervous laughter—because only the truth is funny—that we asked him to write an excerpt for us. Listen up, creatives and agencies.

1. Start Telling the Truth
To each other.  To our clients.  About our brands.

2. Stop the Bloody Politics
Because we’re an industry run by bankers, it is the conniving crowd pleasers rather than the cream that tend to rise to the top. A general rule: in most agencies, those with vision who “get-it” are bullied and undermined at every turn by those with no vision, who don’t.

3. Start Having Fun Again
We used to be the envy of the salary-man. Why have we let it become so serious and dull?  The greatest work ever done in our industry, has always come from places where people like each other and enjoy—really enjoy—playing (and partying) together as a team.

4. Stop Over-Thinking Everything
What we make doesn’t really matter. If we accept this, we get somewhere immediately! It is also true that what we make matters less when we over-analyse it in order to appeal to lowest common denominators.

5. Start Doing Something!
Instead of taking eight months to do one thing we need to be doing eight things in one month.  Many of these things may fail.  Allow them to.  Today, one in ten meetings are necessary: one in ten people at those meetings actually get it; one in ten jobs get made; and one in a hundred are any good.

6. Stop the Incessant Research
Put ten industry professionals who know what they are doing into a room, ten people who know what makes people tick, and who understand a good piece of communication from a bad.  Whatever comes out of that room can and should go straight into the media. We absolutely do not need to waste time obtaining prior validation from a postman, a bus-driver or a housewife.

7. Start Doing Good
We need to bring our clients into corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs—all of them—not just the cigarette boys, the oil companies and the huge conglomerates. They should do it because they want to, not because they feel they have to.

8. Stop Banging on About “Digital”
There’s no such thing. We are all one and the same now and have been since the start of this century. Agencies need to start walking the talk because right now, clients are leaving.

9. Start Up Again, Please
Go out there and do your thing. Don’t suffer it—change it. Make it better. You’ve learned how not to do things. Now put that learning into practice. Be ethical. Be creative. Be nice to other people. Protect and care for your staff.  Be the next Clow or Hegarty or Chiat. Be brilliant.

10. Stop Using Animals in Commercials
Ads with chimps, dalmatians, koalas, ostriches, mooseseses, rhinos, warthogs, water buffalo, lizards, Clydesdales, horses that aren’t Clydesdales [Editor: Perhaps Shires?], dolphins, the list goes on. These are today’s equivalent of two C’s in a K.  And we really can do better folks.

Want the full monty? Check out the vid below.

— Sean Boyle, Global Planning Director, JWT

Though aimed at Yahoo! Sponsored Search advertisers, display advertisers can learn something from this case study as well—and, let’s face it, the wall between the two is thinning so fast that, pretty soon, you won’t be able to tell the difference. If you’re a big display advertiser, it simply doesn’t make sense not to have a search campaign.

In this case study, mid-market search marketer, Don Tuttle, shows how he uses Yahoo! Sponsored Search’s pay-per-click tools and demographic targeting to achieve a positive ROI.

For more, click over to the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.

In the second part of this series, Yahoo’s Head of North American Region Mid-Market Display, Marc Grabowski, discusses demand-side platforms and shows how you can get the most out of them. In the first part, Marc explored the evolution of demand-side platforms.

What is a demand-side platform, anyway?
Back in 2007, a few ad networks knew the days of winning budgets on pure hustle would be short lived. In response, they developed new, differentiating technologies to help agencies utilize their client-side data and allow advertisers to limit frequency duplication—the repeated showing of the same ads to the same consumers.

Holding companies, such as WPP (which had already acquired the ad network, 24×7) and Publicis understood the opportunity in cutting out the networks, which were rumored to keep 50 to 65 percent margins on media. A pleasant side effect of this was that these companies could better serve advertisers.

How? By aligning themselves with a single partner, advertisers and agencies would receive maximum benefit. Instead of losing a major part of their budgets to the ad networks, advertisers and agencies could secure 100 percent of their audience budget.

These service providers have been dubbed “demand-side platforms.”

The two types of demand-side platforms
Demand-side platforms, or DSPs fit into two main categories: DSP techs and DSP holding companies.  The DSP techs are technology providers and include such companies as Media Math, X+1, DataXu, Invite Media. These providers partner with agencies to buy media more efficiently.  DSPs holding companies, such as Publicis, Vivaki, Havas AdNetic, WPP Zeus/B3, IPG Cadreon and OMG Trading Desk, on the other hand, work within holding companies and specialize in assisting their agencies to more cost-effectively buy audience segments

DSPs offer four major benefits to clients:

Billing simplification: Prior to the advent of DSPs, agencies were forced to work through bills (and discrepancies) from dozens of networks and publishers. DSPs work with multiple ad exchanges (such as Yahoo! RMX, Google ADX, and so forth) securing inventory that fit the needs of an advertiser, aggregating invoices into a single statement for the agency.

Data aggregation: Historically, the only data an advertiser could use in a buy was that developed and owned by the publisher. Now, DSPs allow holding companies to leverage advertiser-side data, including purchase data, in their campaigns. This makes media-buy decision-making much more precise.

Frequency control: If an advertiser uses a single DSP, the DSP can manage how many times a user receives and ad from that advertiser. This control ensures that an ad is shown the optimal times to make the best impression. Serving an ad too frequently to a user reduces the likelihood that user will engage with the ad. This, in turn, can lessen the value to the advertiser and lower the amount that the advertiser will pay to the publisher. When an advertiser reduces their acceptable rate they are allocated lower quality inventory, which will often lead to lower still likelihood of events. Maintaining the most efficient frequency allows advertisers to pay higher rates and receive the best possible inventory.

Inventory transparency: DSPs are normally transparent to agencies about the rates on which they buy inventory. The reason for this is price. Most DSPs only charge their clients a percentage for inventory procurement services. These rates range from 10 percent to 40 percent of total inventory buys. Inventory transparency is necessary for agencies to see that they are getting value for their money.  As a result, DSPs are allowed the luxury to buy the inventory that best fits the advertiser’s needs, instead of buying low priced, low quality inventory and marking it up in an effort to make a margin. 

As an industry we are still in the early stages of demand-side platforms but the early results seem promising.  If DSPs can deliver on their lofty promises of global frequency control, utilization of buy side data as well as invoice reconciliation and do it while being totally transparent, yet profitable, they will likely leave a lasting impression on media. 

—Marc Grabowski, Head of NAR Mid-Market Display, Yahoo!

We’re still marveling at the Winter Olympians’ amazing achievements. South Korean luminary Kim Yu-Na earned more points than any previous figure skater.

Snowboarder Shaun White defied the laws of physics with his Double McTwist 1260. And Yahoo! Sports dominated the field as the most visited online destination for 2010 Winter Olympics coverage.

More than 32 million unique visitors chose Yahoo’s site for Olympics coverage, besting its closest competitors NBCOlympics.com and ESPN, which both counted 19 million unique visitors each during February 12 to 28 according to comScore. Yahoo! Sports received more than 40 million total unique visitors during the Winter Olympics, breaking the monthly record in the online sports category and exceeding its closest competitor by more than 19 million unique visitors.

Yahoo! delivered the relevant, timely, and comprehensive information people wanted, resulting in record traffic, click-through rates and engagement.

Speaking of click-throughs, that accidentally-broadcast chat between Shaun White and his coach became the most popular story on the Yahoo! homepage during the Winter Games. The second most popular story looked at the Canadian women’s hockey team’s controversial gold medal victory celebration.

Yahoo! Search also had a great Olympics showing. Lindsey Vonn was the top searched athlete of the 2010 Winter Games, while the Canadian-dominated curling was by far the top searched event.

Yahoo! Sports’ coverage of the 2010 Winter Games had one of the largest editorial teams in Vancouver, led by Yahoo!’s award-winning writers Dan Wetzel, Charles Robinson, Martin Rogers, Jeff Passan and Greg Wyshynski. To give fans a multifaceted view and analysis of the competitions, Yahoo! Sports also lined up Olympians and champion athletes, including Sasha Cohen, Dominique Dawes, Tiki Barber, Elvis Stojko, Donna Weinbrecht, Ken Daneyko, Jessica Mendoza, Bryon Friedman, and Jennifer Jones, plus video hosts Charissa Thompson and Angela Sun.

 Yahoo! was at home in Vancouver, having built a custom-designed broadcast studio and the FanCouver entertainment center, where more than 100,000 fans attending the games visited to participate in Yahoo! events and promotions. Talk about “Vancouverage.” (Take that, Stephen Colbert.)

— Chris Marlowe, Staff Writer

This week, your indefatigable Yahoo! Advertising correspondents went on a field trip to the 4A’s “Transformation 2010” conference in San Francisco. (Those 4A’s stand for the American Association of Advertising Agencies.) While there, we did old the meet and greet, tweeted, and posted to Facebook our take-aways from some the smartest minds in the advertising world. We even did a little live blogging and took some video, too. (Lookin’ good, Carol!)

Below is a round-up of some the most interesting sessions, in case you couldn’t be there in person.

How Social Media Has Transformed the Communications Landscape
Who: Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor in Chief, The Huffington Post
What: Huffington spoke with considerable humor about how the Internet in general and social media in particular have changed the way people interact with media content. “We”—meaning users as well as media outlets—“are consuming news, sharing news, developing news. We are all part of that story,” she noted. Online readership is up 34 million in the past few years, while newspaper viewership is down 7 million. The key for understanding and engaging the online medium for publishers and advertisers is  “transparency and authenticity.” At the 4A’s conference, she mentioned what she calls the “four E’s:” engagement, energy, empathy, enthusiasm, enrichment. These are the real drivers of audience behavior online.
So What?: The shift in attention to online presents a huge opportunity for advertisers and marketers because the most engaged consumers are the most loyal consumers. Notable quote: “If Carol Bartz is outspoken, what does it make me, a demure shrinking violet?” Probably not, Ms. Huffington.

More on this session via AdAge.

How Social Media is Transforming Everything
Who: Pete Blackshaw, EVP Digital Strategic Services Nielsen; Ian Schafer, CEO Deep Focus; Bryan Wiener CEO 360i
What: Traditionally, paid media is the hub and earned media are the spokes; social media puts earned media at the center.
So What?: Tremendous opportunity to measure consumer reactions and emotions as real-time feedback holds us accountable. Social media does not replace TV, it enables communication and feeds curiosity and advocacy in the purchase funnel. Social will also never scale like TV and won’t get the same margins. Agencies need to reengineer themselves for this new business model.

A Message From Magazine Industry Leaders
Who: Cathleen Black, President, Hearst Corporation; Ann Moore, Chairman and CEO, Time Inc.;
Jack Griffin, President, National Media Group; Jann Wenner of Wenner Media
What: Speakers talked about how the vitality of magazines has not been compromised by the Internet but complemented by it. It is a myth that magazines are losing readership; readership is actually up dramatically, especially with young people. As long as magazines continue to innovate, they will remain popular.
So What?: Digital companies should work with magazines to develop new ways to deliver magazine content and advertising Notable quote: “We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines.”

More on this session via AdWeek.

YouthQuake: Transformation of Young Customers
Who:  Jeffrey Cole, Director, Center for the Digital Future, USC Annenberg School and Sr. Associate, Media Link LLC
What: Based on consumer data collected from his research, Cole says that just concentrating on what 12-24-year-old customers want at the time sets a bad precedent for advertisers, because what you really want is to figure out how their purchasing power will emerge as go into their “prime purchasing years.”
So What?: Cole says youth are all about social media and predicts the death of print newspapers within 6 years because of falling readership among this age group. To capture and keep teens into the future, advertisers must turn to social media. Notable quote: “While they don’t read newspapers, teens are active social media users and they will stay in communities for the rest of their lives.”

Transforming Marketing
Who: Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for, VivaKi (Publicis Groupe)
What: Tobaccowala talked about talent retention for agencies. He riffed on Yahoo! CEO, Carol Bartz’ Science, Art and Scale keynote, concentrating on what he feels is the most important factor for getting and keep the best talent: “art.” Talented young people don’t want to just sell soda pop, they want to create art and messages that reach people’s hearts and minds. He made a distinction between what he called “builders” who create great, inspiring advertising and “bean counters” who run the spreadsheets. Today advertising is too often run by the bean counters and it needs to get back to its creative roots.
So What?: While advertisers and agencies need metrics, we also need to inspire creativity. Notable quote: “During the Renaissance, they built; they did not manage only, they did not data read. They built, they painted, they sculpted.”

More on this session via AdAge.

It’s Still All About the Data
Who: Bruce Biegel, Managing Director, Winterberry Group LLC ; Adam Gerber, Chief Marketing Officer, Quantcast ; Scott Hagedorn, CEO, PHD USA ; Bryan Wiener, CEO, 360i ; David Smith, CEO, Mediasmith Inc.; Geoff Ramsey, Co-Founder and CEO, eMarketer
What: The effectiveness of advertising and media is only as good as its intended targets. Some say 28 percent of U.S. marketers plan to shift larger portion of their budgets to online over the next few years. Other estimates range from 59 percent to 70 percent. The group also discussed the advent demand-side platforms.
So What?: If agencies can scale and cooperate with publishers, we should be able to normalize ad data, plug in solutions and be able to plan better and do better post analysis. But we have to “scale that and scale that rapidly.”

For more on DSPs see “Audiences on Demand.”

Are Tablets the Future of Media?
Who: Chris Anderson, EIC, Wired Magazine
What: Anderson talked about how he thinks tablet computers, such as the iPad, will change the way people read magazine content and how advertisers will reach them. He noted that tablets “could provide the most measurable advertising ever”—and a rich experience for the user online or off.
So What?: A tablet computer user doesn’t always have to be online to view magazine content that has previously been downloaded, and the device and programming will continue to track what the user is seeing even in an offline state and that could be a big opportunity for advertisers and agencies.

More on this session via MediaWeek.

How New ‘Cloud’ Technology Can Transform the Agency Enterprise
Who: Greg Smith, Chief Information Officer, McCann Worldgroup
What: On-the-ground ROI benefits for all agencies from the emerging technology of cloud technology— Internet computing that shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC.
Technology has to be included in biz decisions and cloud technology is playing massive role at McCann
So What?: Agencies need to think like software companies. Currently 70% of tech budgets are spent on maintenance. Cloud tech will help save on those costs and let agencies concentrate on creative. Kelley Blue Book saved $100k by shifting to cloud. McCann itself saved 30 percent on tech costs. Quote: “21st century ads are not something just looked at, but something to be used.”

Transformative Research on Integrated Media
Who: Artie Bulgrin, Senior Vice President for Research, ESPN
What: Bulgrin says while TV is still the biggest medium, many ESPN users are now multimedia users (46 percent) are now multi-platform users, who cross media freely, representing 71 percent of its overall media time. In 2008, Disney and ABC TV created a new, state-of-the-art media lab in Austin, Texas, where media users are researched so that the company can better understand consumer behavior with regard to both content and advertising through advanced techniques like eye- and skin-tracking.
So What?: One notable finding of the lab was that ads in mobile often out-performed ads on the PC-based Internet, and that It only takes two seconds for user to process and recognize a brand. If Bulgrin’s findings are correct, it confirms assertion that the message is as important, if not more so, than the medium.

More on this session via MediaPost.

Lastly, enjoy 4A’s Flickr page, as well as our own.

— Michael Mattis, Jeff Sweat, Christine Tseng

If you’re an advertiser running more than one campaign, you will probably welcome the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, a free offline tool that lets you spend less time on the tactical details of campaign management, and more on increasing your return-on-investment.

With Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, it now takes just a few clicks to modify multiple campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads at the same time. And if you get carried away, you can even undo selected changes with no harm done.

For more, visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog.