By Mike Shields, 

Yahoo’s so-so earnings last week were hardly eventful enough to distract most digital industry insiders from the more juicy news coming out of the company.

The recent sudden departures of Hilary Schneider, evp of Yahoo’s Americas region, Jimmy Pitaro, the company’s well-regarded general manager and vp of media, and David Ko, Yahoo’s former svp, audience, still had many buzzing—what exactly is going on over there?

Adding to the confusion is the prominent role of former Microsoft exec Blake Irving, who became Yahoo’s chief product officer in May. A few weeks ago Irving was vilified in the blogosphere for butchering a question about what Yahoo actually is.

Many ex-Yahoos wonder why Irving—a product person—has such a prominent role just below CEO Carol Bartz when a guy like Pitaro did not—especially at a company whose strength is media. As one former exec put it, “It’s like a company at war with itself.”

So we asked the question: Does Yahoo need a new owner or leadership?

“I don’t think they need new leadership. [Yahoo CEO] Carol Bartz is going through the process of changing the culture and methodology of the company, which is a strength of hers. What Yahoo doesn’t have is a transformational idea. They need to find that.”
—Mark Cuban, chairman, CEO and president of HDNet and owner of the Dallas Mavericks

“I’m clearly biased here given my Yahoo roots, but I believe there are 600 million reasons each month why Yahoo can and will remain a productive, profitable and growing enterprise. Yahoo will leverage its unique advantages—their products still represent a fundamental part of people’s everyday digital lives—and they have a 15-year track record of trust from their users. That goodwill gives Yahoo every chance to build a dynamic new chapter.”
—David Katz, founder and CEO, SportsFanLive.com

“What they need to do is become a better communicator. My complaint is that they haven’t been very clear about who they are or what they’ve accomplished under Carol Bartz, who is clearly a smart person.”
—Ed Montes, CEO of Adnetik and former Yahoo exec

“They’ve got a great audience. Yahoo News is a huge brand. Yahoo Finance—people live by that. But they have a monetization problem. When I listen to their earnings calls, they claim that advertisers like their scale, their science and their art, but they really don’t have art. They have banners. Their sales reflect that. So that’s their missing link.”
—David Payne, president and CEO, ShortTail Media; and former svp, gm of CNN.com

“Does Yahoo want to make using the Internet easier and more convenient by pulling the key pieces together in one easy-to-use service [with a] unified or focused navigation as their primary service? Or do they want to provide and be known for specific proprietary services? They still have a large audience and can probably succeed at either. But, it’s hard to get momentum without clear focus.”
—Bob Pittman, MTV founder, former AOL COO and co-founder of the investment firm The Pilot Group

“It’s unclear what direction they want to go in. I’d probably say they should go more media because of their brand strength. They need to be No. 1 a consumer company.”
—Carolyn Everson, Microsoft’s cvp, global ad sales and strategy

To read the entire article, go here.

New Creative Options

What is the best ad or most effective ad unit in online? Unlike TV or print, where this discussion hasn’t happened for years, it rages in regard to online. Richy Glassberg, who 14 years ago led the IAB’s first initiative to standardize creative units and the follow up that introduced the skyscraper and the leaderboard, now has different thoughts about ad creative and paths not taken. “You can’t get a branding message in a standard unit,” said Glassberg, now COO of MedHelp.org, an online health community.“There’s a reason why in online there is search and everything else,” he said. Glassberg’s hindsight? “When we standardized units, we didn’t go for fullsize,” he said. “What we’re left with is trash and trinkets. Think of it: in both TV and print, ads interrupt the flow of content.”

In Glassberg’s mind, the best ads online are video ads. But he believes video ads are priced too high, a point echoed by Amanda Richman of MediaVest: “We don’t have the research to back up that the CPMs should be that much higher than on TV.”

Stacey Deziel of MEC is a big fan of video for branding, as “it’s the entry point or experience that draws people into a brand.” She also see online as providing “greater depth to tell a story,” as the latest forms of rich media enable consumers to go into layers of information like retail locators without having to leave the content environment.

Is bigger better? Is it disruptive? Should an ad flash? Research reviewed for this paper from comScore, IAG,ARS, Dynamic Logic, Insight Express and Nielsen shows that video is probably the most effective format, but video doesn’t make sense everywhere online. Online can never seem to get enough of the new and novel.While TV has its simple :30, online doesn’t have one killer format that appeals to brand marketers. At the annual IAB Mixx conference Sept. 27, a competition was announced for new creative units, and winning submissions will earn a place in the IAB standardized fold. According to the IAB, 80% of all units in the market are standard format. The new units have to appeal from a user experience, work well across an array of sites and give room for brand marketers to tell a story. Finalists will be chosen by the end of 2010, and after testing in market, winners will be made standard by the end of 2011.

Given that online does allow for so much “palette expansion,” here are some creative types noted by those interviewed:

The interstitial video

David Payne, founder of ShortTail Media, formerly an ad network and now a video-ad platform, also favors video formats.  After a couple of years of fruitlessly “selling the value of context to agencies,” he about-faced his company to focus on “the only really good inventory out there to provide value on a brand basis: video.” As a user on a top publisher site calls up a specific page of content (for example, a reader on the site of The New York Times, looking for Tom Friedman’s column), the screen is grayed out and a full-screen video appears in front of the article. “It’s completely about the video,” Payne said. And better yet, “the ads are just repurposed from TV, so no creative cost. It’s a scalable way to run TV creative online.”

Sites such as NYTimes.com, Travel & Leisure, Weather.com, Marketwatch, Reuters and EW.com typically use video ads to monetize specific content areas, he said. How do the publishers prevent prevent these full-screen ads from annoying consumers? “Publishers frequency cap, and some do them only upon first view,”said Payne.  He notes that 30% to 50% of people watch the entire ad as the value exchange of desired content for an ad view is reinforced.  The price charged is similar to that for pre-roll video.

Me!Box

MEC’s Deziel favors these ads as they are “looking at video in a non-linear way.” Mike Emerson, Me!Box’s head of sales, said brand marketers are using it to “make video more quantifiable— to engage, pull consumers in on what is most interesting.”Me!Box layers interactivity on top of any video so that the user can get related information without leaving the video player. It can link to professional content or user-generated content.“You take existing assets and put bookends, add inserts, utility and interactivity with one unit,” explained Emerson. Major brand creative executions launch this fall.

eyeWonder

Launched in 1999, this early leader in the rich-media space has continued to innovate. It works with the unique capabilities of online and develops units that are playful and often relate to the content where they are placed. A Red Bull sponsorship of an air show initiates out of a newsy looking banner on a newspaper homepage and then literally explodes through the content.A Slim Jim creative execution on the WWE site enables the user to feed a wrestler a Slim Jim. When fed, the wrestler initiates a microsite that offers various branded games. While executions like this would not work for all brands, they clearly appeal to the target audience for these products and make a powerful connection with the content in which they are placed. A elegant execution for InterContinental Hotels & Resorts is an exercise in contrast: a rotating cube enables the user to get more information on properties in specific cities.

Google/DoubleClick Rich Media

Google and DoubleClick are focusing on dynamic ad creation that pulls in assets from key properties like YouTube. The ad unit, produced for Ford, dynamically changes with the site content. If the user was reading about technology, green-related topics or about hybrids, the ad automatically brings in the most relevant videos or articles on these topics from the Ford site or YouTube Ford channel.

Download the full study here.