Reading up on the new Yahoo Apt. The ad system could potentially benefit publishers, ad buyers and ad networks by providing streamlined ad buying tools. It is in testing now with the San Francisco Chronicle and The Mercury News in San Jose, and Yahoo expects to roll it out to other publishers beginning next year. I'll be curious to see whether the pricing and network model makes it something that could bring new opportunities for smaller publishers, not just the big chains.
Part of the joy of the platform for publishers is that Apt's geographic, demographic and behavioral targeting tools should allow newspaper Web sites to deliver more relevant ads and charge premium rates for them. And could mean that a newspaper publisher could connect reader behavior not only to what the reader does on the paper's site (visits the auto section for example), but on other sites using Apt as well. According to PaidContent.org's interview with Yahoo's Mike Walrath: "The newspaper might be very interested to know that the second user may not have visited their auto section, but that they did a search on Yahoo for hybrid vehicles the day before. Up until this point, there’s been no way to connect that information effectively."
Right now, selling high value ad placements for extremely targeted content isn't impossible, but it's more difficult on smaller sites because of scale issues. If, for example, you can tell an advertiser you can deliver a specific ad to women who make over $70K a year, live in a specific town and have read the sports section three times in the past week, that would be high value targeting, but on a small site what if that only amounts to a couple of thousand impressions a week or even a month? It will be interesting to see how much network based display ad platforms such as Apt could change this dynamic.
UPDATE: Still thinking about this, and the following the reporting this week after an initial burst of optimism, is also a bit more tempered with skepticism, such as here at MediaWeek, where Mike Sheilds' piece on Apt is subtitled: "Yahoo's new ad platform underwhelms buyers, sellers." Some of the perceived problems center around the fact that critics say it's not bringing anything new to the table: – it's just retreading existing ad exchange models out there, – that's it simply an attempt to compete with existing products such as Google's and MSN's, and that those products are already tied to ad serving platforms. Fortune magazine's story on Apt reports, "Margaret Clerkin, head of the invention unit for WPP's Mindshare, was surpised by the hype surrounding the launch of the new service. 'I wouldn't call it groundbreaking,' she said. 'It's an ad network. It's the same thing Platform A is doing. It's the same thing 24/7 [Real Media] is doing.'"
Looking at it from a small site perspective, it's hard to imagine even wanting an inventory management system NOT tied to the ad serving platform.
Speaking of… anyone had any success using Google Ad manager? What's next for that…
Tags: advertising
