Yahoo boasts new ad deals, joins CBS' online video network

Impeccably timed to suit president Sue Decker's keynote at the Advertising 2.0 conference in New York, Yahoo announced Wednesday that it has inked advertising deals with two major clients: discount retail giant Wal-Mart and interactive ad agency Havas Digital. Terms of neither deal were disclosed.

The company has also signed on as a partner in CBS Interactive's CBS Audience Network of online video distribution partners.

Sue Decker, president of Yahoo

(Credit: Yahoo)

For Wal-Mart, Yahoo will handle display and video advertising on the Walmart.com site as part of a multi-year agreement. Walmart.com will also become part of Yahoo's upcoming AMP advertising management platform, which was originally unveiled in April.

Through the agreement, Yahoo will be the exclusive reseller of Walmart.com ad inventory.

Havas Digital will also be a part of the AMP platform, per Wednesday's announcements. The agency has agreed to work with the Right Media ad exchange, which Yahoo acquired last year, to develop its own inventory-trading platform. It's not the first agency partnership for Yahoo in recent weeks; last month, Yahoo signed a Right Media-related deal with several subsidiaries of ad powerhouse WPP Group.

On the content side, Yahoo's membership in the CBS Audience Network will put it alongside the likes of AOL, Microsoft, Comcast's Fancast, and Veoh. CBS' video catalog will be available on Yahoo's Yahoo TV product, which already has content from Fox and NBC as well as about a dozen cable networks.

Yahoo already had deals with CBS to stream content related to its 60 Minutes news program, as well as local news and sports videos from 16 metro regions.

Decker also announced in her keynote at Advertising 2.0 that the company has launched a newspaper marketing program called Yahoo Circular, in which retailers can take advantage of user interest to target them with personalized newspaper circulars. And the participant count for Yahoo's local Newspaper Consortium advertising project is now up to 779 publications; members of the consortium will be the first to use Yahoo's AMP technology when it debuts later this summer.

Disclaimer: CNET News.com parent company CNET Networks has a content-sharing deal with Yahoo. CNET Networks is also expected to become a CBS property as part of an acquisition offer set to close in the third quarter of 2008.

[RGniadecki]

As more mainstream media companies begin partnerships to control revenue from consumers viewing content online This partnership with CBS makes MSN?s deal with HP seem like backwards thinking. As more people go to the Internet to watch television programs more advertisers are testing the digital waters.
As much as Microsoft and industry analysts want to count out Yahoo they are still #2 in search traffic, more than double the traffic of MSN. With each of these new offerings Yahoo is showing why they are #2 and why they are very relevant to advertisers looking past the Giant, Google.

Randall Gniadecki
Search & Media Analyst
Movéo Integrated Branding
blog.moveo.com