min read
January 14, 2014

New Yahoo Mobile Advertising Strategy - Content and Context

On:
Digital Strategy
On:
Digital Transformation

At CES 2014, Keynote Speaker Marissa Mayer unveiled Yahoo's new direction and a host of new Yahoo Advertising products, sites, and apps focusing on content and context...all in a bid to take over Mobile.Last year's Yahoo Stream Ads and Image Ads were designed to capitalize on Mobile as it becomes a larger and larger piece of the ad marketshare. Yahoo banked on giving advertisers responsive ads and cutting through the clutter of digital ad sizes...Now, Yahoo is taking that mobile push further with Sponsored Tumblr Posts powered by Yahoo Advertising. Marketers have been waiting for features like tailored audiences, better analytics, and A/B testing coming to Tumblr since last May.

Regaining Lost Ground

Last summer, Facebook stole the number 2 digital ad seller spot from Yahoo with solid growth in mobile ads, particularly promoted posts. But getting usurped by Facebook may benefit Yahoo in the long run — Facebook created a feed saturation baseline while marketers became more comfortable advertising in mobile/social. It also helps that, according to Tumblr, its users like and engage with ads more than the competition's users. It could be because of this standing policy:

Don’t fish for notes. Encouraging users to reblog or like a post in the creative or the caption is against our community guidelines.

This caveat will help keep Tumblr's integrity as a site for content, while pushing advertisers to be creative. It will continue to frustrate advertisers after easy metrics — I'm looking at Like Farmers who post "Like if you support/love/hate Thing 1 or Thing 2."

Content and Context

This commitment to content also helps Yahoo provide context since engagement is genuine and they can learn more about their users and better target ads without alienating a large percentage of them. Advertisers also benefit with more important engagement than a guilt-tripped retweet.This follows moves by Google to bring more context and interactivity to ads using G+ reviews from friends and sponsored G+ posts. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo follows Google's lead and unleashes Sponsored Posts from Tumblr into its full ad network.

Yahoo Mobile: The Aviate Acquistion

The push to Mobile advertising was boosted even more with the acquisition of Aviate. Aviate is an Android app that pulls from your other apps to push relevant info to your home screen when you need it — i.e. contextual content pushed to your home screen. Mayer stated that this technology could help deliver Yahoo content in "smarter and more personalized" ways. The content will be given more context. Aviate uses signals like Wi–Fi and GPS to push content to your home screen...hello Yahoo Mobile Location Based Advertising.And just in time for a more robust advertising platform and ad exchange with better targeting and responsive inventory.

Centric Digital