Archive for June, 2009

Performance Sales: Art or Science?

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Yahoo! talks to publishers about managing multiple sales channels

Yahoo!’s Professional Services team is everywhere these days. Last week we blogged about several events Yahoo! would be participating in, an IAB Professional Development class about Managing Multiple Sales Channels being one of them. The class, led by Marc Grabowski, senior director of network sales, and Jeanne Hwang, director of consulting, helped publishers and networks set up their sales teams to develop ad packages that cross sales channels and maximize their inventory. Luckily for me the class was in San Francisco: No travel required!

Within the first few minutes we heard why attendees had given up three hours of their day to be there. The reasons the attendees gave ranged from getting a handle on yield management to developing streams of new ad revenue to dealing with channel conflict. With this industry changing as quickly as it is, I understood where these people were coming from. Luckily, Jeanne and Marc had a few tricks up their sleeves to deal with these issues. The three biggest takeaways were:

Times, they are a changin’
The industry is undergoing a dramatic shift. Marketers are becoming savvier; they have fewer ad dollars to spend but have more metrics at their fingers than ever before, and they want results. Over the last few years we’ve seen a shift in ad dollars from brand to performance. Roll in agencies’ demand for more transparency, and you can see how this is causing a pain point that publishers and networks must address. Bottom line:Publishers and networks must become savvy sellers of performance advertising.

Just say no
Successful sales teams work with marketers to identify the goals of a campaign but, more importantly, they help determine if the campaign is likely to see success on their site or network. Is the marketer looking for clicks or conversions, and what are those worth? Who is their target audience?Does the creative have a clear call to action?Is the conversion path short?Does it require minimal registration information that is easily provided (Such as a zip code as opposed to a social security number)?Bottom line:If the answers to the previous questions point to a bad campaign, sales teams must learn to just say no.

Differentiate to survive
How do you avoid conflict among channels that are selling the exact same inventory?You don’t—it’s inevitable. If marketers are able to access the same inventory from multiple sales outlets, they can take the lowest price, ultimately degrading the value of your inventory. You can fight slipping CPMs by allowing different channels to sell different slices of inventory determined by targeting, frequencies, properties, and so on. Bottom line:Differentiate what sales channels are able to sell to help avoid conflict.

—Megan Bergtholdt, Engagement Manager

Posted in Ad Networks, Advertisers, Agencies, Events, Publishers | No Comments »



Capture More Ad Dollars

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Yahoo! Professional Services offers new performance and display advertising services

Do you ever get the feeling that the advertising world might be leaving you behind? Whether you’re a publisher, an agency or an ad network, it’s getting tougher to give your advertisers what they want. This week, Yahoo! Professional Services is announcing two new services—Display Extension and Performance Sales Enablement—that can help you capture more brand performance ad dollars.

Our Professional Services team works with the first and the largest exchange in the world, which conducts 8 billion transactions a day, and we provide advertising solutions that can help give you an edge in the business. We have several offerings, but today we’ll focus on the two new services.

Display Extension
You may be a search agency or network who’s dabbling in display, or who simply wants to offer your clients more options. Either way, you’ll want to think about combining search and display in a single powerful solution: Display Extension.

Search and display are more powerful together than they are apart. According to a December 2006 comScore study (Close the Loop: Understanding Search and Display Synergy), users who have viewed both types of ads are 244% more likely to purchase something online and 89% more offline compared to users who haven’t seen either. That’s stronger than either search or display separately.

Display Extension lets you target display ads on the Right Media Exchange to users who have clicked on your search ads on any search engine. So you get the visibility of display ads on our robust xchange in front of users who are looking for what you offer. Our assist reporting gives you insight into your advertiser’s sales funnels, so you can understand the contributions of both search and display. We offer you creative services and consultation to help you package your search and display products together.

Performance Sales Enablement
Advertisers are watching every dollar they spend, and they increasingly want to pay only for ads that are performing for them. If you’re a publisher, that means you need to be offering performance-based pricing. Performance-based pricing grew by 11.8% in 2007, says the 2008 IAB Internet Advertising report, where as cost-per-impression pricing shrunk by 13.3%. But shifting to performance pricing is not easy to do without help.

Creating a successful performance-based program isn’t just about changing how you charge – it also means you have to transform your business operations and your way of selling. And that’s where our Performance Sales Enablement offering comes in. We train your sales force, develop messaging for your advertisers, analyze your inventory and help you create performance-based advertising packages.

What can you get out of all of this? Well, happier advertisers, since you’re giving them what they ask for. But you can also get more out of your inventory by capturing more performance dollars. You’ll be leaving less of your money on the table.

You’ll be hearing more about both solutions and others in the coming weeks. In the meantime, visit our Professional Services website to get started with us.

—Megan Pagliuca, Director, Consulting Services

Posted in Ad Networks, Advertisers, Agencies, Right Media Exchange, Right Media News | No Comments »



Leave it to the Professionals

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Capitalize on our expertise with Yahoo! Professional Services

Before I joined Yahoo’s Professional Services team, I told my mom about the job. Her exact words: ‘Professional Services?’ It sounds. Illegal. Not the case. I guarantee that while I’ve seen the team push the limits of possibility when it comes to yield management, I’ve yet to witness any illicit activity. Moms of the world, rest assured.

I must admit the term Professional Services is elusive. Wiki it, and see what you come up with: Professional services are infrequent, technical, or unique functions performed by independent contractors or consultants whose occupation is the rendering of such services. Infrequent—really? Then why am I working 20 hours a day?

So let me attempt to provide some color around the incredible team of kick-ass professionals we’ve assembled at Yahoo!, and named (sorry, Mom) Professional Services.

Our experience is now yours
Yahoo! hasn’t talked much about our Professional Services, but starting this week you’ll start hearing more from us about them. Our Professional Services team works with the first and the largest exchange in the world, which conducts 8 billion transactions a day, and that all adds up to a lot of experience that can benefit you.

What can Yahoo! Professional Services do for you? We can give you the guidance and tools to fine-tune your advertising strategy. If you’re a search agency, you can work with us to start offering display. If you’re a publisher who’s been leaving money on the table, we can help you pick it up. We engage our partners in every aspect of their online advertising business, and offer services including customized technology solutions, outsourced business processes and strategic consulting services.

What we do for you
We help you move to the Right Media Exchange, of course, but that takes more than just a technology change. We work with you in three areas:

Design: Before we get technology involved, we work with you to understand your needs and design a solution specifically for you. We worked with one publisher that sold just 35% of its inventory and suffered dropping CPMs. We tailored a solution for them that used Right Media technology and our professional services to give them the ability to have their salesforce sell performance products, to build valuable user populations, and to extend their business with a display network strategy. With our recommendations, their $300,000 quarterly revenue gap turned into $1.4 million in new business.

Deployment: The heart of our services is getting publishers, agencies, and networks running on the Right Media Exchange. We help participants adopt the technology, and then we show them how to take advantage of it. For example, we train sales forces about the different pricing types on the Right Media Exchange, and then we help them turn that pricing knowledge into a revenue optimization strategy.

Consulting: We work with companies to help transform their advertising models. For example, we may help a search marketing agency move into a brand new ad business by working with them to build a display practice. We help both agencies and publishers build media trading practices that can bring significant increases in margin.

Visit our Professional Services website to learn about the good things we have going on. That means you, too, Mom.

—Rachel White, Director of Professional Services

Posted in Ad Networks, Right Media Exchange | No Comments »



Wiser Than You

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Yahoo!’s Bill Wise talks trash, tackles publishing problems at Digiday

You know it’s a great panel when quips are tweeted:

Yahoo!’s Bill Wise: “I’m smarter than you.”
Time Inc. Media Group’s Kirk McDonald: “You work for Yahoo—how could you be?”

The ribbing was all in good fun, livening up Bill and Kirk’s panel at the Digiday targeting conference’s “The Publisher Roundtable.” But Bill, our GM of Global Exchanges, got the last laugh when the audience caught Kirk apparently stretching his experience in the industry by checking his LinkedIn profile.

In addition to providing a ton of laughs, the conference also tackled some big questions around the industry’s use of data and where the market is moving.

What data is a proxy to valuable customers?
There was no argument that the industry felt that they need to use data to enable accuracy, efficiency and scale. There was also no argument that this is HARD! (Well, duh.) Making data actionable and figuring out which data to use is why hundreds of networks and service providers specialize in only this.

What I didn’t hear enough of was taking into account the consumer consideration cycle and user intent. One panelist did make a great analogy: If there is a 25+ male, high-income, investor on a slide with his kids on a playground, you probably don’t want to choose that time to talk to him about 401ks. The same thing goes for online advertising: you want to target him with a 401k ad when he is in research mode.

Where do we need to go?
What was clear throughout all the panels is that everyone is an intermediary— networks, agencies, and publishers. Networks and publishers increasingly offer agency-like services: Time discussed its branded network, and one of White Pages’ core service offerings is behavioral targeting. We are entering a world of “co-opetition.” Publishers need to focus on syndication to aggregate similar individuals and will likely start selling audiences rather than placements.

—Megan Pagliuca, Director of Consulting, Professional Services

Posted in Ad Networks, Advertisers, Agencies, Data Providers, Events, Publishers | No Comments »