If Jerry Yang is to be believed, Yahoo’s experienced a genuine “eureka” moment. The company has launched a new digital advertising platform, and its CEO is comparing the platform’s importance to that of radio, television, and the Internet.
APT, as the platform is called, used to be known as AMP. It’s been portrayed as a company-saver for some time, but at least one sign of trouble appeared when the person in charge of developing it (Adam Hyder, Senior Director of Engineering) left Yahoo entirely. Launch dates were also ominously omitted from all discussions.
Now, Yang describes APT on Yodel Anecdotal by writing, “It’s simple. It’s open. It’s fast (like minutes vs. days). It provides a new level of control. It offers cross-selling more easily than ever been before. It will provide large amounts of quality inventory. It will help advertisers customize and target their messages more precisely through advanced targeting. And it will drive results. All this from a single online application. No more cobbled together processes or impressions.”
William Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews Group, agreed with these assertions during a presentation at the Advertising Week conference. Members of Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium will act as the next collection of APT testers, while other publishers and companies are scheduled to get their shots next year.
We may not see what Yang would view as a best-case scenario: APT allowing Yahoo to beat Google. But considering Yang’s big boasts and the fact that many folks still want him to step down, APT could lead to an industry-changing development in one way or another.
