Yahoo has recognized that their value offering to the marketplace isn’t search, and it that this has essentially been true for a while now. Since last fall, Microsoft has been serving Yahoo users Bing results, and Bing has been eating into their share of the search space as well. Therefore, the decision makers have wisely chosen to focus on their core competency, which is being one of the most visited content hubs on the web.
They recognize that they can’t remain static though, and that social and sharing is the future of the digital space, especially for marketers. Plain old banner ads will always have their place, but they just aren’t targeted or engaging enough on their own, and they lack the sexiness of more recent ad units to hit the market. Thus, Yahoo decided that they would team up with Facebook, and create what is actually a pretty interesting experience platform that attempts to blend paid and earned media more seamlessly than any other.
Essentially, by linking your Yahoo login to your Facebook page, what you get is a carousel/toolbar that consists of your friends faces when you are anywhere in Yahoo’s properties. If you hover over any of those pictures, it will show you what that friend has been reading/sharing (within Yahoo). It also has a feature that will show you any comments that your friends have made regarding a piece of content, which allows you to essentially combine your content consumption with social dialogue, and will push your comments out to appear on your Facebook page as well.
The advertising part of this comes in the form of new ad units that they are creating. Essentially these “road block” or “pause sign” ads will be branded banners set at the bottom of an article, which contain a question, or quiz, or other interactive feature based not directly on the products/services of the advertising company, but on the content that the user is looking at, in the form of a “sentiment slider” that the user can move along a continuum to express their level of agreement with a particular statement. The example shown to us was in a travel article, and the unit asked the reader to choose which option was his/her dream vacation: skiing in Tahoe, laying on a beach in Hawaii, or hiking in [some good hiking place].
The ad featured a small JetBlue logo, but upon clicking a choice the user was given the option of sharing their choice in Facebook, which would link to the poll unit and tell all their friends that they like skiing, or hiking, or what have you. This would then lead other users back to the content, which is theoretically relevant to them, and another small JetBlue sponsored item in the sidebar, as well as a traditional JetBlue ad at the bottom. All very cleverly integrated so that the user can interact with the content and their social network without ever feeling like they are having a product pushed at them.
The product seems decent, and the integration itself feels like a well-built technology, in terms of user experience. The automatic nature of the passive sharing part of this collaboration, the part that automatically tells your friends what you are reading on Yahoo, will probably be very popular, though I will be curious to see how many conversations occur in this space. As an advertiser though, I have a few issues with the new unit.
First of all, and this is probably just my bias as a search marketer, I don’t really think that it should be a CPM (cost per million impressions) buy. It is contextually targeted, though only at the vertical level, rather than keyword (this also feels like a missed opportunity for relevance), and Yahoo simply chooses a bundle of articles for the ad to run in. Given that the entire pitch and idea is built around interaction however, between the brand and the user, the user and the content, the user and their social network, etc., it really feels like this media should be bought on a pricing system that is also based around interaction. When I brought this up to Patrick Albano, who is Yahoo’s VP of social, mobile, and innovation, he said that that was something they might consider in the future. I am not holding my breath.
The other thing is that the whole point of not having a regular ad unit that contains product/brand messaging to drive the user to the company’s online assets (either website or social platform), is that this unit is not really supposed to feel like advertising, it is supposed to feel like part of the content. If that’s the case, and since they themselves used the “pause sign” terminology, I think that interaction rates would be much higher if they moved it to the fold, and plopped it right in the middle of the article, to actually make it feel like part of the content. If you put something all the way at the bottom of the page, a lot of people aren’t going to take it in or associate it with their consumption. When I made this suggestion, they were much more receptive and indicated that it could actually be something they change after it has been in the market for a bit, maybe Q2 next year.
The last issue, and this is often a problem with advertising in the social space right now, is measurement. They seem a little unclear on success metrics, or even anything beyond clicks, but their idea is to build a brand favorability/purchase intent study into the cost of a buy. Given that it will have to be survey-based, that seems like a rather ham-handed way of tacking “value” onto the offering in order to help justify selling in the cost to clients. It’s a very non-scientific, ethereal thing to try and measure when onsite interaction seems like the obvious way to go.
Overall, it’s an interesting new experience for users and advertisers, but it is a product that I will be happy to wait for, and just sit on the sidelines for the initial phase, instead of rushing to get in line for this.
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