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.
Some would say that peer-to-peer video start-up Joost, created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa, failed to live up to the overwhelming hype that surrounded it. CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith, whose CBS Audience Network of online video sites includes a partnership with Joost, isn't one of them.
Speaking to a small gathering of tech and media reporters at CBS' New York headquarters Thursday, Smith gave a firm "no" when asked if Joost--which requires a software download and has slipped from the Web video radar since its buzzworthy debut--was dead in the water. "(Mike) Volpe knows what he's doing," Smith said of the Cisco Systems veteran who serves as the start-up's CEO. "It's got a good team."
Smith did add that he thinks Joost should be Web-based, not a download.
And with regard to Hulu, the joint Web-video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. that has turned out to be quite the pleasant surprise, Smith would not rule out the possibility that CBS might jump on board, presumably by adding Hulu to its list of Audience Network distribution partners--which include AOL, Bebo, Microsoft, Sling Media, Veoh, and CNET Networks, parent company of CNET News.com. He said that there are no technological barriers to bringing CBS' video content to Hulu and that CBS Interactive's "door is always open."
Regarding Hulu's team, Smith said, "We talk to them all the time.".
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