For many consumers, Yahoo is a brand that's strongly associated with the first dot-com era in the 1990s, and has managed to remain in the first tier of Internet media companies only through consumer inertia.
Since Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo last July, however, the company has worked hard to change that perception. The most notable change is the $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, which gives Yahoo and its advertisers access to a younger, hipper demographic. But that's not the only difference.
In April, Yahoo rolled out its own brand of native advertising, Yahoo Stream Ads. Henrique De Castro, Yahoo's COO, calls these and other native advertising units "tweeners," meaning they sit somewhere between advertising and editorial content. For De Castro, the former vice-president of Google's worldwide Partner Business Solutions group, such ads represent a future in which Yahoo's advertisers can better exploit the company's targeting and scale.
De Castro spoke with Mashable during the Cannes Lions advertising festival in Cannes, France, last week. Below are excerpts from the conversation:
Mashable: What is your pitch to advertisers with regard to Tumblr?
Henrique De Castro: We have not closed the Tumblr acquisition yet. (Note: This interview took place a day before Yahoo officially closed the deal.) As you know, we need to go through a formal process. So we have not reached out to advertisers at all. On the other hand a lot of advertisers like the platform. Tumblr is a fantastic platform and could become the default platform for publishing on the web, and could become almost the standard for publishing on the web and that could be a huge opportunity, as we see the production of content more and more democratized [for more and more people, Tumblr is that platform.]
Mashable: Are you going to make the Yahoo affiliation more apparent on Tumblr?
HDC: I think we're going to have good synergy between the two, but we have brands like Flickr. When you think about Flickr and Tumblr, it could make sense to have different brands for different propositions under the Yahoo umbrella.
Mashable:Obviously, Yahoo's had a lot of changes over the past year or so. What's the perception you're battling? What's the pitch about the 'new Yahoo'?
HDC: The first part is clarifying the pitch because the pitch got a bit blurred over time with different things and now we have a crystal-clear message, which is not radically different … We are the largest publisher on the web, across all types of verticals and all types of content, and we provide the most personalized experience. And that is appealing to advertisers because content and context matter a lot, and there's no one providing the context and content that we provide and that's a very good position to be in. We also have a slew of new products coming in, so they love the core of Yahoo's context and content at scale across many verticals.
Mashable: Does Yahoo skew older than advertisers would like? Was that the thinking behind the Tumblr acquisition?
HDC: Well, it depends where you look. If you look at OMG and Lifestyle, a lot of that skews very young. If you go to the more traditional, that's probably where we have more users from the beginning. So we have a mix, and now we're making sure we cross-fertilize the properties across that mix, and personalization is the right way to do it. And Tumblr is three parts. Part one is a massive publishing platform. The second part is a great, great audience across all types of content and thirdly it's access to advertisers for [midsize publishers].
Mashable: You've experimented recently with native advertising. Can you talk about that?
HDC: When you put the right ad next to the right audience and the right content, it performs better. So what we believe is what we call "tween ads," where the content of the ad is not only the same format as the content, but is also related to the content. An example is you want the Nike shoe ad running if you're looking at content related to running and exercising than if you are looking at [something else]. We call it "tweening" — between the content and the ad. That has two advantages: One is the advertiser needs to buy much fewer impressions to get the same objective; it reduces the risk of rejection, and for us gets a much better user experience.
Mashable: Are the ads themselves different?
HDC: The mind of the user does not split automatically between ads and content. The user has a unique experience, and the reality is in the future, these things will have to converge more and more. We saw that with search, where the ad is exactly the same as content. Stream ads are the same, so we believe that's going to be the future of the industry. Advertisers might choose to produce an ad, or maybe sponsor a piece of content.
Mashable: How do you get Yahoo more into real-time conversations?
HDC: Groups and Answers are pretty much real-time. And we think that platform can be extracted. We already have a lot of real-time conversations. Mail is a pretty real-time conversation. Messages is a pretty real-time conversation. [So is] Groups. What we are are doing is bringing all these real-time conversations together to create that experience.
Mashable: People love the Yahoo Weather app, but is that something you can monetize?
HDC: That is actually a great example. I'm looking at the weather and it's 90 degrees outside, and it's a great occasion to say 'You're in Cannes. It's such nice weather. Why don't you have a Coke?' That's real tweening.
Mashable: What are you focused on for the next six months?
HDC: First, getting our proposition clear in the marketplace. We are the largest publisher on the web with the best content pool possible and the most reach for ad formats — and people are really receptive to that conversation ... We have a lot of conversations with advertisers who want to use us as a global partner, and we're entering into partnerships. And thirdly, continuing to innovate on the product front to get these massive unique personalized experiences that consumers will love.
Image courtesy of Yahoo
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