Scott Burke, Yahoo’s senior vice president of data and advertising platforms, took the stage during the company’s keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show to talk about what he said is “a new unified advertising solution.”
Burke ran through the news fairly quickly, but the thrust of it seems to be that consolidating existing ad products while also introducing some new tools. The company’s ad units now fall into four general categories — native, audience, premium, and search.
The names mostly speak for themselves, I think, except perhaps for the new “audience” ads, which the company describes as “a better way to buy ads targeted to specific audiences.” On the native front, Burke noted that Yahoo is also making an addition of sorts by powering Tumblr’s Sponsored Posts.
Earlier in the presentation, Tumblr founder David Karp had talked about those posts, which is its early stages — he noted that even though the actual ads, or the creative tools used to build them, won’t change with the new integration, the underlying infrastructure will, giving Tumblr advertisers access to “a bevy of new technologies.” Karp also claimed that those posts are being reblogged an impressive 10,000 times on average.
Outside of the ad units, Burke said Yahoo is introducing a new Ad Manager, which is supposed to give advertisers direct access to the company’s ad products, regardless of the company’s size. And there’s a new Yahoo Ad Exchange, a marketplace for programmatic ad-buying.
Overall, Burke said the changes represent “the next generation of tools” that will “simplify a highly complex and fragmented market.”
I’m heading off to interview Burke now, so I will update this post with additional comments. In the meantime, you can read more details in the company blog post.
