The top two executives at Yahoo finally faced the Microsoft question, when asked at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual meeting in Arizona about the unsolicited takeover bid.
Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, Yahoo’s CEO/co-founder and president, respectively, had to talk about Microsoft, and their contention that advertising will save the day, at some point. The point arrived in Phoenix, at IAB’s Ecosystem 2.0 event.
The due believe ads, not Microsoft, represents Yahoo’s hope for the future. It sounds like Microsoft’s bid arrived as an icy cold blast of The Fear, judging by Yang’s comments as noted at Fortune:
“We can’t say a whole lot about the process that we’re going through,” Yang said. “We’re very focused. We’re taking the proposal that Microsoft has given to us seriously… It’s been a galvanizing event for everyone at Yahoo. Our board is spending a lot of time thinking about all the alternatives. It’s something that we need to think through carefully.” Borrowing from the same, carefully-worded key points, Decker also referred to the Microsoft deal as a “galvanizing force internally and externally.”
“The number of people who talk to us about the industry and what it could mean, in either direction or either outcome, it gives me a lot of encouragement that Yahoo goes to the right place,” he said.
At the heart of Yahoo’s ad initiative will be what the company envisions as a one-stop portal for every kind of online advertising, though no timetable for this has been revealed. The question now is will Yahoo shareholders believe online advertising will pass TV ads within five years, as Yang claims. Microsoft’s payoff would arrive a lot sooner than that.
