Yang (left) and Battelle on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET News)SAN FRANCISCO--This hasn't been the best year for a lot of people in the tech industry. But nobody can argue that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang hasn't had a particularly rough time.
"Jerry Yang has had a tough nine months," Web 2.0 Summit host John Battelle of Federated Media said as he introduced the CEO for a talk at the conference here on Wednesday, and went on to list some of his company's much-documented woes. Yang, in a blue blazer and white checkered shirt, slouching a bit in his chair, replied, "That's quite an intro."
But it was still an understatement. Yang took the stage at the high-profile industry conference on the same day that Google announced it was walking away from a 10-year search-advertising deal with Yahoo, which would have brought the beleaguered Sunnyvale, Calif.-based dot-com hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, due to antitrust concerns. Battelle said that, due to the situation, before the talk started that he'd gotten calls from multiple reporters wondering if Yang would actually show up.
But he did, and he was defiant. "I don't regret any minute of what happened," Yang said. "Because I've been there the whole time, it's a part of me and some people say that's great and some people say 'well, you're just too close to it.'"
Even though Battelle, moderating the "conversation," brought up just about every ghost from Yahoo's recent past--from the "peanut butter memo" to the Microsoft takeover debacle to corporate raider Carl Icahn's attempt to shake things up--the talk proved less than electrifying. The CEO kept driving home a single point: that Yahoo is a growing company and that he fully expects it to weather the storm regardless of the situation.
"I certainly didn't expect the year to be what it's been, coming into it, but I think that the environment which we are in today is extraordinary," Yang said. "I think what Yahoo's been through in 2008 has been extraordinary."
Video: Jerry Yang at Web 2.0 Summit (courtesy of TechWeb)
The problem with the Microsoft deal, he said, was that it was the wrong deal for the two companies. "To this day, I have to say that the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo. I don't think that is a bad idea at all...at the right price, whatever the price is, we are willing to sell the company," he explained. "We were ready to negotiate, we wanted to negotiate a deal, and we felt that we weren't that far apart. But at the end of the day, they withdrew and they since have been very clear about not wanting to buy the company."
In a joking reference to the fact that Yahoo may not get within striking distance of the share price Microsoft was willing to buy it for any time soon, Battelle exclaimed, "Why didn't you take the $33 a share, Jerry?" Indeed, some pundits think that Microsoft may show a renewed interest now that Yahoo has been (arguably) sufficiently battered to make it bargain-basement cheap. The catalyst, of course, is the disintegration of the Google deal.
"Google clearly decided that they did not want to stay in the deal, and we're disappointed with that," was Yang's take on it.
He encouraged Battelle--and the audience--to focus on the innovation, not the bad press. Namely, he meant the company's restructuring (or "rewiring," as they seem to prefer) into a developer-friendly open platform. When Battelle asked him if Yahoo was just jumping on the "platform" bandwagon kick-started by Facebook a year and a half ago, Yang replied, "It's very different from Facebook because what people go to Facebook for is very different from why they go to Yahoo."
The other light at the end of the tunnel, as detailed by Yang, is APT, the upcoming advertising product that's such a big deal for the company that they enlisted Mad Men star Jon Hamm, who plays a fictional advertising exec on TV, to help them pitch the product.
"I think that advertising is still fairly early in its development on the Internet, and I know it's a $40 billion industry and everyone talks about it as a large mature industry," Yang said. "But our view has been that the real sort of endpoint for advertising, the real vision for advertising is being able to really take advertisers and advertising offers and being able to map them against consumer needs, consumer desires in a way that is seamless, sort of one big marketplace."
Though he remained characteristically quiet and soft-spoken, Yang made it clear that he, along with the rest of Yahoo, wants to be seen as a fighter.
"The Yahoo story that hasn't really been told, and what we've had to execute in order to do it, is we do believe we're innovating, we do believe we're changing, we do believe we're changing the game," Yang said. "My personal belief is if you're not in the game to win, you shouldn't be in the game, and that's the way that I try to encourage the whole company to think about."
Jon Hamm in a promotional still from 'Mad Men.'
(Credit: AMC)NEW YORK--When Yahoo finally debuted its display-ad platform in a press conference here on Wednesday, CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker had an unusual guest on hand: actor Jon Hamm, who plays 1960s-era advertising exec Don Draper on the critically acclaimed drama Mad Men.
"I do feel a little strange being up in front of a group of people, in front of cameras, talking about advertising, instead of smoking nine cigarettes and drinking three or four glasses of Scotch," Hamm said, referring to Draper's hard-living attitude, "although maybe if this was a little later in the day we could do that."
It might seem odd for Yahoo to unveil a new product with an actor famous for playing a fictional figure on the Madison Avenue of four dozen years ago. But Mad Men, which won an Emmy Award on Sunday for Best Drama, is a wild hit in New York's media and advertising circles, and that's who Yahoo is trying to court. They're the ones whom Yahoo has to convince that its new ad platform, called APT, will make their lives and jobs easier.
"Today's digital advertising process is broken," Decker said in the press conference, part of the fifth annual New York Advertising Week festivities. "As we see it, we count more than 30 different operational steps, 30, from a time that an ad is conceived to the time that it runs on a publisher's site and is optimized for their strategy."
Actor Jon Hamm, star of AMC's 'Mad Men,' speaking at a press conference unveiling Yahoo's new APT platform.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)APT hopes to solve those problems. It's a Web-based product that aims for a smoother and more efficient ad-buying process with a drag-and-drop interface, simple analytics, and all-in-one client "dashboard." Geared toward not just advertisers, but also digital publishers, media companies, ad networks, and agencies, the technology uses multiple kinds of targeting--geographic, demographic, and behavioral--to achieve what Yahoo says will be the best possible destination for graphical ads with a minimal amount of work.
"We challenged ourselves to make the whole process of doing business in the digital world easier, more transparent, and more profitable," Yang said of APT's development. "APT from Yahoo is all about spending less time managing digital advertising and spending more time delivering business results.
Yahoo first began to talk about this extensive display-ad strategy in April, then calling the product AMP. On Wednesday, the company announced that the re-named APT's first clients are two Bay Area newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News.
Both publications are already part of Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium, which is an ad network for participating media companies. APT will become available to other Newspaper Consortium partners over the course of the rest of the year and into 2009, followed by other clients in the publisher, advertiser, and agency sectors. Also in 2009, Yahoo's own ad industry will shift to the APT platform.
Yang said that APT's genesis is rooted in the company's relationship with Right Media, an advertising exchange start-up that Yahoo acquired last year after initially purchasing a 20 percent stake in 2006. "That move really also enabled us a core foundational network technology that's going to be able to be part of this new system that we're announcing today," he explained.
But, he said, it was the Newspaper Consortium that really sparked the demand. "(Members were) telling us (of) the need for a far more robust digital advertising platform," Yang said. "It was becoming far more difficult for them to find the exact audiences, it was taking them too much time to find them if they found them at all, and they needed to be more effectively monetizing their inventory in the digital world."
One member of the consortium was on hand to testify on Yahoo's behalf: Dean Singleton, president of the MediaNews Group, which owns the Mercury News. "We are launching a new era with this extraordinary platform, APT from Yahoo, which will drive a sea change in how we operate as newspapers and capture opportunities," said Singleton, who also serves as publisher of the Denver Post and Salt Lake Tribune.
But APT won't be without competition. AOL has amassed its own ad service, Platform-A, out of a number of start-up acquisitions, and earlier this week announced the addition of an ad exchange called BidPlace to the platform. Google, the digital-ad leader that has spooked Madison Avenue, is still best known for its text ads but has made move after move to court industries like television, radio, and newspapers.
And with its aggressive focus on display advertising, some may see the beleaguered Yahoo's move as effectively conceding the search ad market to rival Google; the two have, in fact, partnered in a controversial deal that followed Yahoo's failed acquisition negotiations with Microsoft. It would pull in more revenue for Yahoo, but it would also further cement Google's position as the clear industry leader.
Since Google hasn't yet cornered display advertising as effectively, and the landscape now consists of dozens of different ad networks, Yahoo sees opportunity with APT. Bringing along the dashing Jon Hamm, speaking just as suavely as his Don Draper alter ego, couldn't hurt. In his address to the audience, Hamm drew parallels between the digital advertising revolution and the challenges faced by the Mad Men characters as they dealt with the explosion of television advertising in the early 1960s. Today, the ad industry needs to adapt to a climate that demands innovative, straight-to-consumer marketing and up-to-the-minute delivery.
"In 1960, New York City alone had eight daily newspapers. Every significant daily had offices around the world, and print journalists were the rock stars of their day," Hamm said. "Today we see Arnold Schwarzenegger announcing his California gubernatorial candidacy on Leno, and Barack Obama announcing his vice presidential candidate, Joe Biden, by text message."
"Don Draper knew how to connect," Hamm continued. "He'd recognize that what my friend Jerry Yang is about to share with you will rock the advertising world in the same way that radio and television did way back when."
For an industry that's become captivated with the alluring Mad Men, that just might be enough of a pitch.
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