Yahoo! Starts Pilot Program With ‘Demand-Side’ Platforms

Yahoo Monday announced a new pilot program in which it is working with a group of “demand-side” ad exchanges and networks to develop best practices for audience-buying. Demand-side platforms involved in the program include Invite Media, Mediamath, Data Xu, Turn and X+1. Agencies have increasingly turned to these ad systems to wrest more control of the ad-buying process from traditional online ad networks and keep more revenue for themselves as well. “The pilot will demonstrate how Yahoo, in partnership with these industry leaders, can provide marketers with access to the audiences they most want to reach by leveraging insights from buyers, sellers and third-party data providers,” wrote Ramsey McGrory, vice president, North American Marketplaces, and Seth Dallaire, vice president, mid market sales, on Yahoo’s Advertising Blog.

Read More: MediaPost

Yahoo’s Bradford Leaves To Join Demand Media

Yahoo! Inc.’s Joanne Bradford, a senior vice president who oversees North American revenue and market development, is leaving to join online-content provider Demand Media Inc.  Bradford will be chief revenue officer at Demand Media, the Santa Monica, California-based company said today in a statement posted on its Web site. Yahoo said Bradford will work with her team over the next few weeks to ensure a smooth transition. Yahoo, owner of the second-most-used Internet search engine in the U.S., is losing Bradford amid a turnaround effort under Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz, who joined the company last year. During a presentation to analysts in October, Bartz praised Bradford for doing a “really, really fine job.” Bradford joined Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo in 2008, after working at online-ad agency Spot Runner Inc. and earlier at Microsoft Corp. Closely held Demand Media, which develops content for social Web sites on topics such as fitness, travel and comedy, was founded in 2006 with backing from Oak Investment Partners, Spectrum Equity Investors and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Yahoo rose 14 cents to $16.46 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have fallen 1.9 percent this year.

Read More: BusinessWeek

Google: The Future Of Display Advertising

It’s been two years since we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick, a leading provider of display advertising technology. This is the first in a series of posts over the next few weeks about our vision for online display advertising in the years ahead. Today, Susan Wojcicki previews the series and looks back at how we’ve brought Google and DoubleClick technologies together over the past two years. -ed.

The first online display advertisement — a simple, clickable image — appeared online over 16 years ago. Fast forward to 2010. You’re likely to see display ads — image, text, video and rich-media formats — on most of the websites that you visit. These ads are crucial to the Internet. They provide information about thousands of products, services and businesses. They help to fund the web content and services that we all use. And they enable large and small advertisers to reach new customers, increase sales and grow their businesses. I’ve watched display advertising evolve from a series of simple, static images, to the incredible creative units that we see today. The best display ads today are often like mini-websites with complex animations, stunning graphics or videos, interactive and social elements. As technology enables better ways of matching ads, they’re becoming more relevant to the audience that views them and the website that hosts them. In addition, they’re bought and sold across the web more seamlessly than ever before.

Read More: GoogleBlog.Blogspot.com