Yahoo is a company that likes to put its name on things, be it Yahoo News, Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Search. So it came as a bit of a surprise last month when the company announced that it’s breaking that pattern with its programmatic platform.
Prashant Fuloria, Yahoo SVP advertising products
Google did something similar when it first bought DoubleClick in 2008, and more recently Facebook has done the same with LiveRail, keeping its original name and adding on bits and pieces from other acquisitions and its own proprietary ad buying tools.
But for Prashant Fuloria, Yahoo’s senior vice-president of advertising products, there’s an extra element of symbolism involved in keeping the BrightRoll brand alive.
“There is Yahoo as a premium publisher, and then there are these ad tech products that we offer, which are media agnostic,” he told Marketing in a recent interview. “By that I mean, when you use a product with the Brightroll brand, you can use that product on any inventory you care about. While we would love for you to use our buying platform with Yahoo inventory, we’re not going to bias your campaigns or your buys one way or the other.”
Naturally, many marketers are concerned that tech platforms owned by large media companies may be privileging their inventory above other sources advertisers’ might want to buy from. Fuloria says that by keeping Yahoo’s tech consolidated under a separate brand that doesn’t share a name with its media holdings, the company hopes to signal to marketers that its drawing a very bright line between the two businesses.
The flip side is that Yahoo-owned-and-operated inventory will be sold primarily through a separate marketplace, Gemini, which Brightroll users can access but aren’t obligated to buy from. And whether they’re buying from the exchanges or from Gemini, they’ll have the exact same level of data targeting and measurement capabilities.
“Our strategy is to make it easier for folks to choose Yahoo as a publisher, or choose our programmatic stack, Brightroll, depending on their marketing objectives,” he says. “The way we do that is through providing one consistent and unified targeting platform, and one measurement platform.”
Going cross-device
Media planners that are skeptical about cross-device targeting technology will often say there are only two companies that can do it reliably at scale: Facebook and Google.
But Yahoo’s looking to contest that monopoly with its own cross-device capabilities based on a logged-in userbase of 1 billion, with 600 million of them accessing via mobile each month. Fuloria says that, for some time, Yahoo’s been able to connect users on desktop to their mobile devices deterministically, and advertisers are already able to use this data to target users across their devices. It’s currently working on augmenting those capabilities with probabilistic methods to extend its cross-device graph to users that aren’t logged in.
“We’re extremely excited about how fast our cross-device graph is growing, and the accuracy and precision with which we can map users across devices for a variety of objectives,” Fuloria says. Cross-device mapping not only enables advertisers to target users with sequential messaging across the devices they use, it’s also essential for measuring conversions that happen on a different device from where the initial ad was seen, he says.
In that regard, Yahoo has an ace in the hole — Flurry, the mobile ad network where Fuloria was chief product officer until its $240-million acquisition by Yahoo last year. Thanks to Flurry’s massive reach within the app development community, Yahoo now sees nearly 2 billion mobile devices globally.
“Just to talk about the Canadian market — there are roughly 35 million Canadian people, but Flurry sees 38 million monthly active devices in Canada,” Fuloria says. That means a lot of mobile data that can be used to tie users from one device to another. “Mapping is really a big deal for us because of the sheer reach that Flurry has.”
A new kind of native marketplace
Yahoo hasn’t forgotten about its own media. Gemini is a big priority for the company, Fuloria says, and it’s been gaining traction with media buyers. Gemini started selling native advertising in Canada in May 2014, he says, and it now represents a quarter of Yahoo’s display business in Canada.
The challenge the company faces with Gemini is that many still don’t really understand what it does or what sets it apart from Google AdWords. The idea of a “unified marketplace” for search and native advertising is still pretty novel, in part because only a handful of media players have the breadth to offer both search and native inventory.
In case you’re thinking that Gemini’s selling expensive, publisher-hosted custom content, the “native” we’re referring to here is the other kind — dynamically generated in-feed ads. Gemini takes the advertiser’s copy and creative assets to automatically create an ad that fits either a search header, a headline thumbnail in a Yahoo News feed, a Tumblr post, or other context-appropriate ad format depending on where the advertiser wants to be seen and who they want to target.
Fuloria says Yahoo’s seen native ads perform a lot better than standard display ads, not just for acquisition-driven campaigns but for brands as well.
“A high engagement ad is a high engagement ad, regardless of whether your goal is an online conversion, offline conversion, or just brand lift,” he says. “So over the last couple of quarters, we’ve seen a very significant increase in the interest and participation of what we would call brand advertisers, who are trying to drive either an offline conversion or brand impact in our native marketplace.”
Like any automated ad platform, Gemini stands or falls based on the data it can leverage. Although Yahoo’s first-party data may not be as endless as Facebook’s or Google’s, it does have a considerable amount of insight into what its users are searching for, what they’re getting emails about, and what they’re reading, to help advertisers home in on niche, high-value customers. Accutely aware that may not be enough, Fuloria says Yahoo has worked hard to build an ecosystem that is as open and plug-and-play as any independent tech platform, so advertisers aren’t restricted in how they can mix in their own data. He notes that because the Gemini and Brightroll platforms are standardized, any audience profile created in one platform is accessible from the other.
Fuloria says the second motive behind last month’s big Ad Week announcement was to make it clear that while it might have looked like Yahoo was backing off on ad tech, it’s still very much a big priority for the company.
“Both Gemini as our native and search marketplace and Brightroll as our programmatic stack are big investments for the company,” he says. “We’re investing in both, and we’re also making sure they work together well together in a way that gives advertisers choice depending on their campaign and their needs.”
