Despite Recent Blows, Size Keeps It a Valuable Partner for Advertisers

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Its Google search deal is history, Microsoft is no longer a suitor, and a combination with Time Warner’s AOL is theoretical, at least for now. Its stock has gone from an all-time high of $33.63 in October 2007 to $10.34 as of Nov. 12 of this year. And yet Yahoo is a lot more valuable in the eyes of Madison Avenue than it is in the eyes of Wall Street, thanks to an important but oft-forgotten point in the debate over how old and stodgy the traditional portal model might be: Size still matters.

According to Chrysler, a home-page buy on Yahoo is worth 75 TV ratings points or the equivalent of four 30-second spots in a hit prime-time show such as ABC’s ‘Desperate Housewives.’

“Advertisers are looking at where’s the traffic, volume and value is today. And today is very positive for advertisers at Yahoo,” said Chris Moloney, chief marketing officer at Scottrade, which in August was the top online-ad spender, according to TNS Media Intelligence. “Google is considered to be the 800-pound gorilla of the internet but it doesn’t have content the way Yahoo does. It receives a massive volume of traffic.”

Just ask Chrysler. Recently, the automaker’s chief marketing officer, Deborah Wahl Meyer, talked about using NBC, Fox and Yahoo as the media pillars of a big campaign to push the automaker’s 2009 Dodge Ram truck. She said she thinks of Yahoo “almost as a fifth network.”

Indeed, according to Chrysler, a home-page buy on Yahoo is worth 75 TV ratings points — the equivalent of four 30-second spots in a hit prime-time show such as ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.” To promote the Ram, Chrysler bought not just Yahoo’s home page but also those of MSN and AOL.

“We needed to go wide and build awareness, but we have to be smart about serving the right content to the right consumer at the right time,” said Susan Thomson, director-media at the automaker. That’s why it also used Yahoo’s behavioral-targeting technology to craft 30 different ad units that could be served up based on behavioral habits. “To us as a partner, yes, [Yahoo] is valuable,” she said.

Successes
Consider, for a moment, Yahoo’s recent achievements: Its Olympics site, Yahoo Olympics, dominated the games in August, bringing in more visitors in the U.S. than NBC and Microsoft’s NBCOlympics.com. In September, Yahoo Video overtook MySpace TV as the second-ranked video site to Google’s YouTube. Some of its recent content initiatives have borne fruit. Its original entertainment show “Primetime in No Time” is getting a million views a day. Its business show, “TechTicker” on Yahoo Finance is getting 450,000 views a day, which compares favorably with CNBC. The first intimate photos of President-elect Barack Obama and his family on election night appeared on Yahoo’s photo-sharing site, Flickr.

And there are pockets of innovation at Yahoo that excite advertisers, such as mobile — an area where “Yahoo is pushing the envelope in ways Google’s not,” said Daina Middleton, senior VP-director of Sunao at Moxie Interactive. Another bright spot is its Yahoo Consumer Direct service, a partnership with Nielsen and Wal-Mart that helps trace web ads to in-store sales.

Source: adage.com
Author: Abbey Klaassen and Michael Learmonth