The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

Saul Hansell writes in his Bits blog for the New York Times about Yahoo’s new ad system, called APEX. Basically, Yahoo is collecting its various subdivisions and getting into the market for ad-serving software, so more information about you can be collected, and more “appropriate” advertising can be spirited to your computer. Now you’ll have better-directed banner ads to ignore.

Ignoring banner ads is a problem that will continue to confound advertisers and the agencies that do things the way they’ve always done them.

In a way, what Yahoo and other companies in the ad-serving field are doing is the former generation’s media buying dream come true: A specific ad delivered exactly to the one person - you - who might be interested in buying that specific product. Whoopee! No more wasted ‘eyeballs’.

But the internet is not a medium. It’s not linear. I don’t have to go past your ad to get to where I want to go. So I’m not going to leave the site to which I just navigated just to look at the ad you’ve just “served” me. No matter how expertly-directed your ad is. ( Jim Amos puts this much more succinctly than I; if this sentence confuses you, ask him to explain). Besides, people aren’t dumb. If (per Yahoo’s example) you go to WebMD to check on cholesterol levels, and the next thing you see is an ad for the product Robert Jarvik just stopped endorsing, even the dullest person browsing is going to make the connection that all you’re doing is following me around online.

There’s more to it than just ad-serving, of course. As the Times article says:

The key benefit that Ms. Schneider said Yahoo will give publishers is the ability to have more pages on which their existing sales force can sell ads. In the case of the newspaper deal, local papers will be able to sell bundles that include ads on visitors to the newspaper site and other people on Yahoo’s network that it can identify as living in the local area.

The behavioral targeting ambitions can be seen in a different deal that Yahoo cut last year with WebMD last fall. Under this scenario, users who visit WebMD will be tagged, presumably through a cookie on their browsers. Later, when those users visit Yahoo properties, they can be shown ads that are sold by WebMD (rather than Yahoo). Since WebMD knows what conditions they are interested in and has relationships with health care companies interested in people with those conditions, it presumably can sell the ads for more money than Yahoo could.

Yahoo’s new, “revolutionary” system may make the process simple, more efficient, and “friction free” for advertisers and more profitable for media companies, but ultimately, it does no good for the customer, reader, or surfer.

Until that happens, I’d keep the revolution descriptor under wraps.

Tags: Ad-serving, Yahoo