Sunnyvale, California-based Web pioneer Yahoo has begun rolling out its newly renamed APT platform for  buying and selling online display advertising, releasing details of the previously named AMP project at a Wednesday event in New York attended by company co-founder and chief executive Jerry Yang and other Yahoo executives. Yang touted the APT platform as transformative for both publishers and advertisers. "It’s simple. It’s open. It’s fast. [And] provides a new level of control," Yang wrote on the company blog. Newspaper Publishers From Yahoo's Consortium Begin Using Platform The APT platform, which has been undergoing testing since the middle of 2007 when it was know as Project Apex, hopes to make it easier for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell online display advertisements throughout the Web. Display ads are those typically incorporating graphics interspersed throughout the Web, and not the small text-based ads that run alongside search results that have proven so successful for search leader Google -- success Yahoo aims to achieve with display ads using APT. The APT platform lets advertisers place graphical banner ads on both Yahoo's Web properties, which are viewed by over 500 million people monthly, as well as on other major Web sites in the company's large network including those of some 800 newspapers throughout the United States and sites like eBay, Forbes and WebMD. The first newspaper publishers to begin using the APT platform were MediaNews Group Inc.'s San Jose Mercury News and Hearst Corp.'s San Francisco Chronicle, Yahoo said at Wednesday's launch held in conjunction with an Advertising Week conference. "APT is real today and we’re starting to roll it out to our Newspaper Consortium members," Yang wrote in a message posted on Yahoo's blog Wednesday, referring to the company's consortium of online newspaper publishing partners it launched in November 2006. Joining Yang for the APT rollout event were fellow Yahoo executives including president Sue Decker and executive vice president of Yahoo U.S. Hilary Schneider. Yahoo said that all the members of its newspaper consortium would be able to use APT by the end of the year or early next year, in a series of future staged rollouts that were to begin with members Scripps Newspapers, MediaNews Group and Cox Newspapers. Publishers And Advertisers Expected To Save Time With APT Yahoo hopes that APT will attract advertisers, ad networks, publishers and ad agencies with the platform's ability to unify all online ad management tasks, including monitoring the performance of ad campaigns. The broad scope of the platform was a key advantage over rival systems according to Decker. "One of the major benefits of APT from Yahoo is the fact that it's an open system, designed to enable advertisers to reach their audiences in their favorite places across the Web, and publishers to monetize inventory across the broadest possible demand channels," Decker said in a statement Yahoo released Wednesday. "As we transform the advertising marketplace, we're excited to have key members of the Newspaper Consortium, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, lead the way in this historic journey," Decker said of the initial publishers using APT. Decker said that the ad delivery systems in use today are generally too time consuming and difficult to navigate, faults Yahoo hoped to overcome with APT. "It takes 30 steps and multiple requests for proposals that can take up to six weeks," Decker noted of the existing systems APT sought to replace. "APT offers a simplified work flow process. This new platform will deliver business results and provide a whole new level of control," Decker added. Aims To Push New Cross-selling Opportunities Among a long list of features and benefits Yahoo executives touted for the new APT platform were the following:  | Guaranteed cross-selling with pre-defined selling rules | | | Ad Exchange for non-guaranteed inventory | | | Advanced audience targeting techniques based upon behavior and geography | | | Inventory lookup and forecasting across individual and partner sites | | | Creative workflow automation and personalization | | | Powerful rate card tools for improved yield management | | | Filters for better controls around creatives | | | Flexible Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) | | | Federated ad call to support multiple ad formats | The launch of APT has been viewed by industry analysts as important to Yahoo, a point that Yang drove home in personal terms in his Wednesday blog entry. "I started dreaming about this day 18 months ago," Yang wrote of an APT system that he said would "play a unique role in changing the face of online advertising." Yahoo said that it had high expectations for the platform, and that it had the "potential to allow unprecedented ease of cross-selling across the largest open network of publishers, advertisers, ad networks and agencies from a single integrated interface," a claim that Yang said was not simply "hype." Faces Competition From Microsoft, Google, MySpace George Irish, the president of Hearst Newspapers, saw the size and reach of the APT platform as a benefit his company and other newspapers in Yahoo's consortium would benefit from. "The Newspaper Consortium's open,  collaborative and exciting partnership with Yahoo is enabling a crucial transformation in the newspaper industry," Irish said. "With this next-generation platform we can realize the powerful combination of Yahoo's technology innovations, national reach and partner network with the Consortium's rich local content, sales forces and local market expertise," he added. MediaNews Group vice chairman and chief executive William Dean Singleton called the APT platform "game-changing," and said that his company and the Yahoo consortium "are jointly accelerating toward fully using the platform to aggregate inventory, target relevant audiences and drive revenue growth." APT faced competition from several similar display advertising initiatives including projects developed by Microsoft, AOL and Google, along with a system from Publicis Groupe called VivaKi which Yahoo itself is a member. An initiative from social networking giant MySpace launched on Wednesday could also compete with the Yahoo APT system. The APT platform uses information about the queries conducted on its search engine to help target and group ads, according to Yahoo executive John Slade who spoke after Wednesday's rollout, a technique that could separate the platform from rival systems. Yahoo Rolls Out Transformative APT Web Advertising System Newspaper publishers have faced a decline in print ad sales, leading many to turn to online advertising in an effort to remain solvent. Among the members of WebmasterWorld, one of the oldest and most popular Web sites serving mostly the technically-savvy people who manage Web sites and specialize in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), reaction to the Yahoo APT rollout was mixed. One WebmasterWorld member, using the handle "weeks" said that the new Yahoo platform "looks much like OpenX and Google Ad Manager on steroids," and added that "Yahoo has figured this out and is going to try to do something about it. They are going after demographics." Another member of WebmasterWorld hoped that APT would help publishers turn around poor performance seen from previous Yahoo advertising systems. "Does this mean publishers will start earning money again?" the member, using the handle "ember" asked Thursday. A Yahoo representative wrote in a message on WebmasterWorld that advertisers and publishers were not the only groups that would benefit from the new APT platform. "Users will benefit as well, with a more relevant online experience. They'll see better targeted and more engaging ads," the representative noted. Related Links :
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9:38 pm on Sep. 25, 2008 (utc 0)